Shawdesh desk:

As many as 29 makeshift houses were gutted in a fire at a Rohingya camp in Ukhia upazila of Cox’s Bazar district in the early hours of Tuesday.

Fortunately, no casualties were reported till the filling of this report around 11.30am.

Commanding officer of the Armed Police Battalion-14, Md Naimul Haque said the fire broke out at a house in Block-B of Camp-5 around 2am and soon engulfed a number of adjoining houses.

Two fire tenders took nearly three hours to douse the flames around 5am, he said, adding that only a probe would help ascertain the exact cause of the fire.

Additional police force have been deployed in the camp to avert any untoward incident.

Fires in Rohingya camps are not uncommon in the district. On January 9, as many as 600 makeshift houses were gutted in a fire that broke out at Rohingya Camp-16 in the Palangkhali Shafuillakata area of Ukhia.

Another massive fire broke out at a Covid isolation centre in extension-20 of Ukhia Rohingya camp on January 2. Fortunately no casualties were reported in that fire but some 70 hospital beds were charred.

On March 22 last year, as many as 15 people were killed and more than two lakh Rohingya refugees incurred damages as a massive fire broke out at three Rohingya camps in Ukhia, destroying 10,000 houses.