Last year was the deadliest on record for Rohingya refugees fleeing by sea, with deaths continuing to soar in 2026, the UN said Friday (April 17, 2026), after hundreds were lost in a shipwreck earlier this month.
"In 2025, nearly 900 Rohingya refugees were reported missing or dead in the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal," the United Nations refugee agency's spokesman Babar Baloch told a press briefing in Geneva.
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That marks "the deadliest year on record" for the region, according to data from UNHCR, he said. Mr. Baloch highlighted that out of the more than 6,500 Rohingya who had attempted perilous sea crossings last year, "one in seven [were] reported missing or dead".
That, he said, was "the highest mortality rate worldwide of any major route for refugee and migrant sea journeys". The Rohingya mainly leave from huge camps in Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar, where more than a million refugees forced to flee across the border from war-torn Myanmar's Rakhine state live in squalid conditions.
