BALUKHALI REFUGEE CAMP, Bangladesh (AP) — The faces of the men half-buried in the mass graves had been burned away by acid or blasted by bullets. Noor Kadir finally recognized his friends only by the colors of their shorts.

Kadir and 14 others, all Rohingya Muslims in the Myanmar village of Gu Dar Pyin, had been choosing players for the soccer-like game of chinlone when the gunfire began. They scattered from what sounded like hard rain on a tin roof. By the time the Myanmar military stopped shooting, only Kadir and two teammates were left alive.

Days later, Kadir found six of his friends among the bodies in two graves.

They are among at least five mass graves, all previously unreported, that have been confirmed by The Associated Press through multiple interviews with more than two dozen survivors in Bangladesh refugee camps and through time-stamped cellphone videos. The Myanmar government regularly claims such massacres of the Rohingya never happened, and has acknowledged only one mass grave containing 10 “terrorists” in the village of Inn Din. However, the AP’s reporting shows a systematic slaughter of Rohingya Muslim civilians by the military, with help from Buddhist neighbors — and suggests many more graves hold many more people.

“It was a mixed-up jumble of corpses piled on top of each other,” said Kadir, a 24-year-old firewood collector. “I felt such sorrow for them.”

The graves are the newest piece of evidence for what looks increasingly like a genocide in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state against the Rohingya, a long-persecuted ethnic Muslim minority in the predominantly Buddhist country. U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric called the AP report “extremely troubling,” and urged Myanmar to allow access to the region for further investigation. Spokeswoman Heather Nauert also said the U.S. State Department was “deeply, deeply troubled by these reports of mass graves.”

Repeated calls to Myanmar’s military communications office went unanswered Wednesday and Thursday. Htun Naing, a local security police officer in Buthidaung township, where the village is located, said he “hasn’t heard of such mass graves.”

Myanmar has cut off access to Gu Dar Pyin, so it’s unclear just how many people died, but satellite images obtained by the AP from DigitalGlobe, along with video of homes reduced to ash, reveal a village that has been wiped out. Community leaders in the refugee camps have compiled a list of 75 dead so far, and villagers estimate the toll could be as high as 400, based on testimony from relatives and the bodies they’ve seen in the graves and strewn about the area. A large number of the survivors carry scars from bullet wounds, including a 3-year-old boy and his grandmother.

The following message will be displayed to users with unsupported browsers: Your browser does not support the iframe HTML tag. Try viewing this in a modern browser like Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Internet Explorer 9 or later. This before-and-after slider of May 26, 2017, left, and Dec. 20, 2017, satellite images provided by DigitalGlobe show the village of Gu Dar Pyin, Myanmar before and after destruction. (DigitalGlobe via AP)

Almost every villager interviewed by the AP saw three large mass graves at Gu Dar Pyin’s northern entrance, near the main road, where witnesses say soldiers herded and killed most of the Rohingya. A handful of witnesses confirmed two other big graves near a hillside cemetery, not too far away from a school where more than 100 soldiers were stationed after the massacre. Villagers also saw other, smaller graves scattered around the village.

In the videos of the graves obtained by the AP, dating to 13 days after the killing began, blue-green puddles of acid sludge surround corpses without heads and torsos that jut into the air. Skeletal hands seem to claw at the ground.

___

THE MASSACRE

Survivors said that the soldiers carefully planned the Aug. 27 attack, and then deliberately tried to hide what they had done. They came to the slaughter armed not only with rifles, knives, rocket launchers and grenades, but also with shovels to dig pits and acid to burn away faces and hands so that the bodies could not be identified. Two days before the attack, villagers say, soldiers were seen buying 12 large containers of acid at a nearby village’s market.

The killing began around noon, when more than 200 soldiers swept into Gu Dar Pyin from the direction of a Buddhist village to the south, firing their weapons. The Rohingya who could move fast enough ran toward the north or toward a river in the east, said Mohammad Sha, 37, a shop owner and farmer.

Sha hid in a grove of coconut trees near the river with more than 100 others and watched as the soldiers searched Muslim homes. Dozens of Buddhists from neighboring villages, their faces partly covered with scarves, loaded the possessions they found into about 10 pushcarts. Then the soldiers burned down the homes, shooting anyone who couldn’t flee, Sha said.

At the same time, another group of soldiers closed in from the north, encircling Gu Dar Pyin and trapping villagers in a tightening noose.

When Mohammad Younus, 25, heard explosions from hand grenades and rocket launchers, he ran to the road. He was shot twice while trying to call his family. One of the bullets, still in his hip, can be seen when he pinches the skin.

His brother found him crawling on his hands and knees and carried him to some underbrush, where Younus lay for seven hours. At one point, he saw three trucks stop and begin loading dead bodies before heading off toward the cemetery.

Buddhist villagers then moved through Gu Dar Pyin in a sort of mopping-up operation, using knives to cut the throats of the injured, survivors said, and working with soldiers to throw small children and the elderly into the fires.

“People were screaming, crying, pleading for their lives, but the soldiers just shot continuously,” said Mohammad Rayes, 23, a schoolteacher who climbed a tree and watched.

Kadir, the chinlone player, was shot twice in the foot but managed to drag himself under a bridge, where he removed one of the bullets himself. Then he watched, half-delirious, for 16 hours as soldiers, police and Buddhist neighbors killed unarmed Rohingya and burned the village.

“I couldn’t move,” he said. “I thought I was dead. I began to forget why I was there, to forget that all around me people were dying.”

Near dawn, three boys creeping toward the bridge from another village to see what had happened heard Kadir’s groans and brought him back with them.

For days, Rohingya from the area stole into Gu Dar Pyin and rescued people who’d been left for dead by the soldiers. Thousands of people from the area hid deep in the jungle, stranded without food except for the leaves and trees they tried to eat. More than 20 infants and toddlers died because of the lack of food and water, villagers said.

A day after the shooting began, another group of survivors watched from a distant mountain as Gu Dar Pyin burned, the flames and smoke snaking up into a darkening sky.

___

THE MASS GRAVES

Six days after the massacre, Kadir risked his life to dodge the dozens of Myanmar soldiers occupying the local school so he could look for his four cousins. That’s when he found his teammates half-buried in the mass graves. He also saw four plastic containers that turned out to contain acid.

In the next days and weeks, other villagers braved the soldiers to try to find whatever was left of their loved ones. Dozens of bodies littered the paths and compounds of the wrecked homes; they filled latrine pits. The survivors soon learned that taller, darker green patches of rice shoots in the paddies marked the spots where the dead had fallen.

As monsoon rains pounded the sometimes thin layer of dirt on the graves to mud, more bloated bodies began to rise to the surface.

“There were so many bodies in so many different places,” said Mohammad Lalmia, 20, a farmer whose family owned a pond that became the largest of the mass graves. “They couldn’t hide all the death.”

Eleven days after the attack, Lalmia set out to see if the soldiers had destroyed the Quran in the village mosque. He walked quickly along the edge of the jungle to the mosque, where he found torn pages from the Muslim sacred book scattered about.

As he tried to clean up, someone shouted that the soldiers were coming. He fled through an open window, looking back over his shoulder at about 15 patrolling soldiers.

When he turned back to the path, he stopped abruptly: A human hand stuck out of a cleared patch of earth.

Lalmia counted about 10 bodies on the grave’s surface. Although he was worried about the military finding him, he used a six-foot bamboo stick to check the pit’s depth. The stick disappeared into the loose soil, which made him think that the grave was deep enough to hold at least another 10 bodies.

“I was shocked to be that near so many bodies I hadn’t known about,” Lalmia said. He and other villagers also saw another large grave in the area.

He estimates that soldiers dumped about 80 bodies into his family’s pond and about 20 in each of the other four major graves. He said about 150 other bodies were left where they fell.

Three of the big graves were in the north of the village. Two of those pits were about 15 feet wide and 7.5 feet long, villagers said. The pond, which Lalmia had helped dig, measured about nine feet deep and 112 square feet.

Many other smaller graves with three, five, seven, 10 bodies in them were scattered across Gu Dar Pyin. During a short walk, Abdul Noor, an 85-year-old farmer, saw three dead bodies stuffed into what might have been a latrine hole and covered with soil. He saw another two near some banana plants, and three in the corner of a compound.

“I tried to see more, but the stench was overwhelming and the soldiers were still at the school,” he said.

Two other men separately said they saw another latrine filled with bodies and covered with a thin layer of soil. They said it contained between five and 10 bodies on the top, and thought there were at least five more corpses below.

After 12 days, Younus went to try to find four family members who’d been killed. He saw people in the graves without hair or skin who he thought had been burned with acid, and dozens of decomposing bodies in the rice fields.

The next day, on Sept. 9, villager Mohammad Karim, 26, captured three videos of mass graves that were time-stamped between 10:12 a.m. and 10:14 a.m., when he said soldiers chased him away. When he fled to Bangladesh, Karim removed the memory card from his phone, wrapped it in plastic and tied it to his thigh to hide it from Myanmar police.

In the Bangladesh refugee camps, nearly two dozen other Rohingya from Gu Dar Pyin confirmed that the videos showed mass graves in the north of the village. They easily picked out details from a geography they knew intimately, such as the way certain banana plants were positioned near certain rice paddies.

The videos show what appear to be bones wrapped in rotting clothing in a soupy muck. In one, the hands of a headless corpse grasp at the earth; most of the skin seems melted away by acid that has stained the earth blue. Nearby are two bloated legs clad in shorts. A few paces away, the bones of a rib cage emerge from the dirt.

The AP saw several other videos that appeared to show graves in the village, but only Karim’s contained the original time stamps. In some cases, villagers said Myanmar soldiers took their phones and memory cards, sometimes at knife and gun point, at the checkpoints they had to pass through on the way to Bangladesh.

Some survivors never found the bodies of their loved ones.

Rohima Khatu, 45, recounted her story as tears streamed down the face of her 9-year-old daughter, Hurjannat, who sat silently by her mother’s side.

Khatu was determined to find her husband, even though women risked not only death but rape if they were caught by the soldiers. Villagers said her husband was shot after he stayed home to protect their 10 cows, five chickens and eight doves, along with their rice stockpiles.

So 15 days after the massacre, she searched for him in the graves at Gu Dar Pyin’s northern entrance, trying to identify him by the green lungi and white button-down shirt he had been wearing. Only 10 minutes passed before someone shouted that about 20 soldiers were coming.

“There were dead bodies everywhere, bones and body parts, all decomposing, so I couldn’t tell which one was my husband,” Khatu said. “I was weeping while I was there. I was crying loudly, ‘Where did you go? Where did you go?’”

“I have lost everything.”

___

Foster Klug has covered Asia for the AP since 2005. Follow on www.twitter.com/apklug</s>Investigation in Myanmar Reveals Disturbing Massacre, At Least 5 Mass Graves

An investigation by The Associated Press details a massacre and at least five mass graves in Myanmar's Rakhine State. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have fled from there to Bangladesh since last August.</s>The faces of the men half-buried in the mass graves had been burned away by acid or blasted by bullets. Noor Kadir could only recognise his friends by the colours of their shorts.

Kadir and 14 others, all Rohingya Muslims, had been choosing players for the soccer-like game of chinlone when the gunfire began. By the time the soldiers stopped shooting at the Myanmar village of Gu Dar Pyin, only Kadir and two teammates were still alive.

Days later, Kadir found six of his friends lying among the bodies in two graves.

They are among more than five mass graves, all previously unreported, that have been confirmed by Associated Press through multiple interviews with more than two dozen survivors in Bangladesh refugee camps and through time-stamped cellphone videos. The Myanmar government regularly claims massacres like Gu Dar Pyin never happened, and has acknowledged only one mass grave containing 10 “terrorists” in the village of Inn Din. The findings, however, suggest not only the military’s slaughter of civilians but the presence of many more graves with many more people.

Inside the Rohingya refugee camps, traumatised exiles ask why the world won't call the crisis 'genocide'

The graves are the newest piece of evidence for what looks increasingly like a genocide in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state against the Rohingya, a long-persecuted ethnic Muslim minority in the predominantly Buddhist country. Repeated calls on Wednesday and Thursday to Myanmar’s military communications office went unanswered. Htun Naing, a local security police officer in Buthidaung township, where the village is located, said he “hasn’t heard of such mass graves”.

Myanmar has cut off access to Gu Dar Pyin, so it’s unclear just how many people died, but satellite images obtained by AP from DigitalGlobe show a village decimated. Community leaders have compiled a list of 75 dead so far, and villagers estimate the toll could be as high as 400, based on testimony from relatives and the bodies they had seen in the graves and strewn about the area.

Almost every villager interviewed by AP saw three large mass graves at Gu Dar Pyin’s northern entrance, near the main road, where witnesses say soldiers herded and killed most of the Rohingya. A handful of witnesses confirmed two other big graves near a hillside cemetery, and smaller graves scattered around the village.

In the videos obtained by the AP, dating to 13 days after the killing began, blue-green puddles of acid sludge surround corpses without heads and torsos that jut out from the earth, skeletal hands seeming to claw at the ground.

Survivors said soldiers planned the August 27 attack, and tried to hide what they had done. They came to the slaughter armed not only with rifles, knives, rocket launchers and grenades, but also with shovels to dig pits and acid to burn away faces and hands so that the bodies could not be recognised.

After more than 200 soldiers swept into Gu Dar Pyin around noon, Mohammad Sha, 37, a shop owner and farmer, hid in a grove of coconut trees near a river with more than 100 others. They watched as the military searched Muslim homes and dozens of Buddhist neighbours, their faces partly covered with scarves, loaded the possessions they found into about 10 pushcarts. Then the soldiers burned down the homes, shooting anyone who could not flee, Sha said.

Mohammad Younus, 25, was crawling on his hands and knees after being shot twice when his brother carried him to some underbrush, where he lay for seven hours. At one point, he saw three trucks stop and begin loading dead bodies before heading off toward the cemetery.

Buddhist villagers then moved through Gu Dar Pyin in a sort of mopping-up operation, using knives to cut the throats of the injured, survivors said, and pitching the young and the elderly into fires.

Thousands of people from the area hid deep in the jungle, stranded without food except for the leaves and trees they tried to eat. From about 10 miles away another group of villagers watched from a mountain as Gu Dar Pyin burned.

In the days and weeks after the attack, villagers braved the soldiers to try to find whatever was left of their loved ones. Dozens of bodies littered the paths and compounds of the wrecked homes, and filled latrine pits. The survivors soon learned that taller, darker green patches of rice shoots in the paddies marked the spots where the dead had fallen.

Bloated bodies began to rise to the surface of the rain-saturated graves.

“There were so many bodies in so many different places,” said Mohammad Lalmia, 20, a farmer whose family owned a pond that became the largest of the mass graves. “They couldn’t hide all the death.”

Eleven days after the attack, Lalmia was fleeing soldiers patrolling near the mosque when he discovered a human hand sticking out of a cleared patch of earth. Lalmia counted about 10 bodies on the grave’s surface and estimated it held at least another 10.

Lalmia and other villagers also saw another large grave in the area, and smaller graves containing as many as 10 bodies scattered about the village.

On September 9, villager Mohammad Karim, 26, captured three videos of mass graves time-stamped between 10.12am and 10.14am, when soldiers chased him away, he said. In the Bangladesh refugee camps, nearly two dozen other Rohingya from Gu Dar Pyin confirmed that the videos showed mass graves in the north of the village.

About 15 days after the massacre, Rohima Khatu, 45, searched for her husband in the graves at Gu Dar Pyin’s northern entrance, trying to identify him by his clothes.

“There were dead bodies everywhere, bones and body parts, all decomposing, so I couldn’t tell which one was my husband,” Khatu said. “I was weeping while I was there. I was crying loudly, ‘Where did you go? Where did you go?’”</s>Scores of Rohingya villagers in Myanmar have been massacred and buried in 5 mass graves, according to an exclusive investigation by the Associated Press news agency.

The report by the news agency on Thursday includes witness testimony from two dozen survivors and relatives of victims, as well as time-stamped mobile phone footage of the aftermath of the attack.

Estimates suggest 400 members of the persecuted minority were killed by Burmese troops.

In one massacre, a group of men were picking teams for a local football-like game called ‘chinlone’ in the village of Gu Dar Pyin, when soldiers began firing at them.

A survivor named Noor Kadir later found six of his friends buried in two separate mass graves. He said the bodies of the victims were only recogniseable through the colour of their shorts.

The mass killing is believed to have taken place on August 27 and survivors told the Associated Press that soldiers had tried to cover up evidence of the atrocity.

Video obtained by the agency indicates attempts at using acid to remove the bodies.

The remains contained inside the shallow graves rose to the surface after heavy rainfall and survivors were able to film the evidence.

Myanmar has previously admitted responsibility for one mass grave containing 10 bodies in the village of Inn Din.

The killings happened in September but authorities only acknowledged them after the discovert of the mass grave in December, claiming those who had died were “terrorists”.

Amnesty International described the December discovery as just the “tip of the iceberg”.

Since August 2017, more than 655,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar to neighbouring Bangladesh fleeing what the UN describes as “textbook genocide”.

Myanmar’s military claims that it is fighting what it terms “terrorists” but survivors crossing into Bangladesh bring with them accounts of mass killing, rape, and the burning down of homes.

Bangladesh and Myanmar have agreed a deal to send Rohingya refugees back. As part of the repatriation deal, Rohingya will be held in holding centres, which Rohingya activists have called “concentration camps”.

Widely regarded as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world, the mainly Muslim Rohingya people, are denied citizenship by the Burmese government, which claims they are not native to Myanmar.</s>The faces of the men half-buried in the mass graves had been burned away by acid or blasted by bullets. Noor Kadir finally recognized his friends only by the colors of their shorts.

Kadir and 14 others, all Rohingya Muslims in the Myanmar village of Gu Dar Pyin, had been choosing players for the soccer-like game of chinlone when the gunfire began. They scattered from what sounded like hard rain on a tin roof. By the time the Myanmar military stopped shooting, only Kadir and two teammates were left alive.

Days later, Kadir found six of his friends among the bodies in two graves.

They are among at least five mass graves, all previously unreported, that have been confirmed by The Associated Press through multiple interviews with more than two dozen survivors in Bangladesh refugee camps and through time-stamped cellphone videos. The Myanmar government regularly claims such massacres of the Rohingya never happened, and has acknowledged only one mass grave containing 10 "terrorists" in the village of Inn Din. However, the AP's reporting shows a systematic slaughter of Rohingya Muslim civilians by the military, with help from Buddhist neighbors — and suggests many more graves hold many more people.

"It was a mixed-up jumble of corpses piled on top of each other," said Kadir, a 24-year-old firewood collector. "I felt such sorrow for them."

The graves are the newest piece of evidence for what looks increasingly like a genocide in Myanmar's western Rakhine state against the Rohingya, a long-persecuted ethnic Muslim minority in the predominantly Buddhist country. U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric called the AP report "extremely troubling," and urged Myanmar to allow access to the region for further investigation. Spokeswoman Heather Nauert also said the U.S. State Department was "deeply, deeply troubled by these reports of mass graves."

Repeated calls to Myanmar's military communications office went unanswered Wednesday and Thursday. Htun Naing, a local security police officer in Buthidaung township, where the village is located, said he "hasn't heard of such mass graves."

Myanmar has cut off access to Gu Dar Pyin, so it's unclear just how many people died, but satellite images obtained by the AP from DigitalGlobe, along with video of homes reduced to ash, reveal a village that has been wiped out. Community leaders in the refugee camps have compiled a list of 75 dead so far, and villagers estimate the toll could be as high as 400, based on testimony from relatives and the bodies they've seen in the graves and strewn about the area. A large number of the survivors carry scars from bullet wounds, including a 3-year-old boy and his grandmother.

Almost every villager interviewed by the AP saw three large mass graves at Gu Dar Pyin's northern entrance, near the main road, where witnesses say soldiers herded and killed most of the Rohingya. A handful of witnesses confirmed two other big graves near a hillside cemetery, not too far away from a school where more than 100 soldiers were stationed after the massacre. Villagers also saw other, smaller graves scattered around the village.

Survivors said that the soldiers carefully planned the Aug. 27 attack, and then deliberately tried to hide what they had done. They came to the slaughter armed not only with rifles, knives, rocket launchers and grenades, but also with shovels to dig pits and acid to burn away faces and hands so that the bodies could not be identified. Two days before the attack, villagers say, soldiers were seen buying 12 large containers of acid at a nearby village's market.

The killing began around noon, when more than 200 soldiers swept into Gu Dar Pyin from the direction of a Buddhist village to the south, firing their weapons.

For days, Rohingya from the area stole into Gu Dar Pyin and rescued people who'd been left for dead by the soldiers. Thousands of people from the area hid deep in the jungle, stranded without food except for the leaves and trees they tried to eat. More than 20 infants and toddlers died because of the lack of food and water, villagers said.

A day after the shooting began, another group of survivors watched from a distant mountain as Gu Dar Pyin burned, the flames and smoke snaking up into a darkening sky.

Rohima Khatu, 45, recounted her story as tears streamed down the face of her 9-year-old daughter, Hurjannat, who sat silently by her mother's side.

Khatu was determined to find her husband, even though women risked not only death but rape if they were caught by the soldiers. Villagers said her husband was shot after he stayed home to protect their 10 cows, five chickens and eight doves, along with their rice stockpiles.

So 15 days after the massacre, she searched for him in the graves at Gu Dar Pyin's northern entrance, trying to identify him by the green lungi and white button-down shirt he had been wearing. Only 10 minutes passed before someone shouted that about 20 soldiers were coming.

"There were dead bodies everywhere, bones and body parts, all decomposing, so I couldn't tell which one was my husband," Khatu said. "I was weeping while I was there. I was crying loudly, 'Where did you go? Where did you go?'"</s>Investigation in Myanmar Reveals Disturbing Massacre, At Least 5 Mass Graves

An investigation by The Associated Press details a massacre and at least five mass graves in Myanmar's Rakhine State. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have fled from there to Bangladesh since last August.

There's an Associated Press report today detailing a massacre and at least five mass graves in the Rakhine State in Myanmar. That's where the country's security forces carried out a brutal campaign against the Muslim minority Rohingya last August. The government insists it was an operation against Rohingya terrorists. As Michael Sullivan reports, the AP story differs. And a warning - some of the descriptions here are graphic.

MICHAEL SULLIVAN, BYLINE: There are now at least 688,000 Rohingya in refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh. And dozens of them talked to the AP about what happened in a village called Gu Dar Pyin on August 27. And some showed the AP time-stamped cellphone video of what they say was a massacre there. The survivors said the Myanmar military came with shovels to dig graves and acid to make the bodies impossible to identify.

PHIL ROBERTSON: What it shows is a degree of preparation which we haven't seen very clearly before.

ROBERTSON: We've been receiving reports about these mass graves and about massacres. And it was just trying to find a way to learn what has happened in an area that has been completely shut off to the international community by the Burmese military.

SULLIVAN: Matthew Smith, who heads the Southeast Asia-focused human rights group Fortify Rights, agrees. This, he says, was new.

MATTHEW SMITH: We actually hadn't documented Myanmar army soldiers using acid to dissolve bodies. We have documented soldiers cutting bodies up and burying them in relatively shallow graves. We documented soldiers burning piles of bodies. But we've not yet documented the use of acid.

SULLIVAN: And that's important, says Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch.

ROBERTSON: That shows an intention. And that goes to the point of intense preplanning. And that's one of the crucial issues where you cross over from crimes against humanity toward something like genocide.

SULLIVAN: Crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, genocide - all are terms that have been used before to describe what's happened to the Rohingya since August and before. But if the AP report is accurate, human rights advocates say, it puts even more pressure on Aung San Suu Kyi and the military to allow the international community to do what Myanmar has refused to do so far - allow unfettered access to northern Rakhine State. Matthew Smith of Fortify Rights.

SMITH: We're really concerned that Aung San Suu Kyi continues to deny access to U.N. fact-finders and monitors. And the longer that access is denied, the more difficult it will become to do the type of forensic fact-finding that is important in identifying victims, locating additional mass graves and the like.

SULLIVAN: Myanmar continues to insist there have been no massacres of Rohingya and no mass graves. The one exception - the 10 bodies found in late December, Rohingya executed by Myanmar's military that the military insists were terrorists like those who carried out the August attacks against Myanmar security forces. For NPR News, I'm Michael Sullivan in Chiang Rai, Thailand.</s>The US state department has said it is “deeply, deeply troubled” by new reports of mass graves in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, where the military has been accused of atrocities against minority Rohingya Muslims.

The Associated Press reported earlier it had confirmed the existence of more than five previously unreported mass graves in the Myanmar village of Gu Dar Pyin, through interviews with survivors in refugee camps in Bangladesh and through time-stamped mobile phone videos.

“We are deeply, deeply troubled by those reports of mass graves,” state department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told a regular news briefing. “We are watching this very carefully. We remain focused on helping to ensure the accountability for those responsible for human rights abuses and violations.”

Nauert said the reports highlighted the need for authorities in Myanmar to cooperate with an independent, credible investigation into allegations of atrocities in northern Rakhine state.

A United Nations spokesman said the report was “extremely troubling,” and he urged Myanmar to allow access to the state where the killings occurred.

Stephane Dujarric said the UN was “very concerned” about the possible mass graves. He says the report “underscores the need for the UN to have access” to Myanmar’s Rakhine state, which hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have fled since August.

The Myanmar government regularly claims massacres like Gu Dar Pyin never happened, and has acknowledged only one mass grave containing 10 “terrorists” in the village of Inn Din.

But the AP report seems to suggest a military slaughter of civilians and the presence of many more graves with many more people.

It is the newest piece of evidence for what looks increasingly like a genocide in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state against the Rohingya, a long-persecuted ethnic Muslim minority in the predominantly Buddhist country.

Myanmar has cut off access to Gu Dar Pyin, so it’s unclear just how many people died, but satellite images obtained from DigitalGlobe, along with video of homes reduced to ash, reveal a village that has been wiped out.

Community leaders in the refugee camps have compiled a list of 75 dead so far, and villagers estimate the toll could be as high as 400, based on testimony from relatives and the bodies they’ve seen in the graves and strewn about the area. A large number of the survivors carry scars from bullet wounds, including a three-year-old boy and his grandmother.

Almost every villager interviewed by the AP saw three large mass graves at Gu Dar Pyin’s northern entrance, near the main road, where witnesses say soldiers herded and killed most of the Rohingya.

A handful of witnesses confirmed two other big graves near a hillside cemetery, not too far away from a school where more than 100 soldiers were stationed after the massacre. Villagers also saw other, smaller graves scattered around the village. 



Survivors said that the soldiers carefully planned the 27 August attack, and then deliberately tried to hide what they had done.

The killing began around noon, when more than 200 soldiers swept into the village from the direction of a Buddhist village to the south, firing their weapons.

When Mohammad Younus, 25, heard explosions from hand grenades and rocket launchers, he ran to the road. He was shot twice while trying to call his family. One of the bullets, still in his hip, can be seen when he pinches the skin.

“People were screaming, crying, pleading for their lives, but the soldiers just shot continuously,” said Mohammad Rayes, 23, a schoolteacher who climbed a tree and watched.

Noor Kadir, 14, was shot twice in the foot but managed to drag himself under a bridge, where he removed one of the bullets himself. Then he watched for 16 hours as soldiers, police and Buddhist neighbours killed unarmed Rohingya and burned the village. 



“I couldn’t move,” he said. “I thought I was dead. I began to forget why I was there, to forget that all around me people were dying.”</s>Scores of Rohingya villagers in Myanmar have been massacred and buried in 5 mass graves, according to an exclusive investigation by the Associated Press news agency.

The report by the news agency on Thursday includes witness testimony from two dozen survivors and relatives of victims, as well as time-stamped mobile phone footage of the aftermath of the attack.

Estimates suggest 400 members of the persecuted minority were killed by Burmese troops.

In one massacre, a group of men were picking teams for a local football-like game called 'chinlone' in the village of Gu Dar Pyin, when soldiers began firing at them.

A survivor named Noor Kadir later found six of his friends buried in two separate mass graves. He said the bodies of the victims were only recogniseable through the colour of their shorts.

The mass killing is believed to have taken place on August 27 and survivors told the Associated Press that soldiers had tried to cover up evidence of the atrocity.

Video obtained by the agency indicates attempts at using acid to remove the bodies.

The remains contained inside the shallow graves rose to the surface after heavy rainfall and survivors were able to film the evidence.

Phil Robertson of Human Rights said the report "raises the stakes for the international community to demand accountability from Myanmar" and underlined the need for a UN-led arms embargo on the country.

"The AP's report that (soldiers) brought along to Gu Dyar Pin village containers of acid to disfigure the bodies and make identification more difficult is particularly damning because it shows a degree of pre-planning of these atrocities," Robertson said.

"It's time for EU and the US to get serious about identifying and leveling targeted sanctions against the Burmese military commanders and soldiers responsible for these rights crimes."

UN special envoy on human rights in Myanmar,Yanghee Lee told reporters on Thursday the killing and disposal of the bodies bear "the hallmarks of a genocide".

When asked about violence against the Rohingya minority at the hands of the Burmese military, Lee responded that "you can see it’s a pattern".

However, the UN rights envoy said she was unable to make a declaration regarding "genocide" until international tribunals could weigh the evidence.

Myanmar has previously admitted responsibility for one mass grave containing 10 bodies in the village of Inn Din.

The killings happened in September but authorities only acknowledged them after the discovery of the mass grave in December, claiming those who had died were "terrorists".

Amnesty International described the December discovery as just the "tip of the iceberg".

Since August 2017, more than 655,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar to neighbouring Bangladesh fleeing what the UN describes as "textbook genocide".

Myanmar's military claims that it is fighting what it terms "terrorists" but survivors crossing into Bangladesh bring with them accounts of mass killing, rape, and the burning down of homes.

Bangladesh and Myanmar have agreed a deal to send Rohingya refugees back. As part of the repatriation deal, Rohingya will be held in holding centres, which Rohingya activists have called "concentration camps".

Widely regarded as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world, the mainly Muslim Rohingya people, are denied citizenship by the Burmese government, which claims they are not native to Myanmar.</s>New evidence points to troops' massacres of Rohingya Muslims

BALUKHALI REFUGEE CAMP, Bangladesh - The faces of the men half-buried in the mass graves had been burned away by acid or blasted by bullets. Noor Kadir could only recognize his friends by the colors of their shorts.

Kadir and 14 others, all Rohingya Muslims, had been choosing players for the soccer-like game of chinlone when the gunfire began. By the time the soldiers stopped shooting at the Myanmar village of Gu Dar Pyin, only Kadir and two teammates were alive.

Days later, Kadir found six of his friends among the bodies in two graves.

They are among more than five mass graves, all previously unreported, that have been confirmed by the Associated Press through multiple interviews with more than two dozen survivors in Bangladesh refugee camps and through time-stamped cellphone videos. The Myanmar government regularly claims massacres like Gu Dar Pyin never happened and has acknowledged only one mass grave containing 10 "terrorists" in the village of Inn Din. The AP's findings, however, suggest not only the military's slaughter of civilians, but the presence of many more graves.

The graves are the newest piece of evidence for what looks increasingly like a genocide in Myanmar's western Rakhine state against the Rohingya, a long-persecuted ethnic Muslim minority in the predominantly Buddhist country. The U.N. special envoy on human rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, said Thursday that the military's operations against the Rohingya bear "the hallmarks of a genocide."

Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement that the AP report "raises the stakes for the international community to demand accountability from Myanmar."

Repeated calls Wednesday and Thursday to Myanmar's military communications office were unanswered. Htun Naing, a local security police officer in Buthidaung township, where the village is located, said he "hasn't heard of such mass graves."

Myanmar has cut off access to Gu Dar Pyin, so it's unclear just how many people died, but satellite images obtained by the AP from DigitalGlobe show a village decimated. Community leaders have compiled a list of 75 dead so far, and villagers estimate the toll could be as high as 400, based on testimony from relatives and the bodies they've seen in the graves and strewn about the area.

Almost every villager interviewed by the AP saw three large mass graves at Gu Dar Pyin's northern entrance, near the main road, where witnesses say soldiers herded and killed most of the Rohingya. A handful of witnesses confirmed two other big graves near a hillside cemetery, and smaller graves scattered around the village.

In the videos obtained by the AP, dating to 13 days after the killing began, blue-green puddles of acid sludge surround corpses without heads and torsos that jut out from the earth, skeletal hands seeming to claw at the ground.

Survivors said soldiers planned the Aug. 27 attack and tried to hide what they had done. They came to the slaughter armed not only with weapons, but also with shovels to dig pits and acid to burn away faces and hands so that the bodies could not be recognized.

Buddhist villagers then moved through Gu Dar Pyin in a sort of mopping-up operation, using knives to cut the throats of the injured, survivors said, and pitching the young and the elderly into fires.</s>The US State Department said on Thursday that it was "deeply, deeply troubled" by new reports of mass graves in Myanmar's Rakhine State, where the military has been accused of atrocities against minority Rohingya Muslims.

The Associated Press reported earlier it had confirmed the existence of more than five previously unreported mass graves in the Myanmar village of Gu Dar Pyin, through interviews of survivors in refugee camps in Bangladesh and through time-stamped cellphone videos.

"We are deeply, deeply troubled by those reports of mass graves," State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told a regular news briefing. "We are watching this very carefully. We remain focused on helping to ensure the accountability for those responsible for human rights abuses and violations."

Nauert said the reports highlighted the need for authorities in Myanmar to cooperate with an independent, credible investigation into allegations of atrocities in northern Rakhine state.

In December, Myanmar's army had said that the security forces had discovered a mass grave on the edge of a village in Rakhine State, and had launched an investigation.

A violent crackdown by the security forces in response to attacks by militants in the state has caused around 650,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee to Bangladesh in recent months.
The existence of five mass graves in northern Rakhine State is confirmed by the Associated Press through multiple eyewitness testimonies and video evidence. Many of the bodies in the graves were Rohingya victims of the Gu Dar Pyin massacre.