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. 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. A survivor named Noor Kadir later found six of his friends buried in two separate mass graves. 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. 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. 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. 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. (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. 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. 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. 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. 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. “There were dead bodies everywhere, bones and body parts, all decomposing, so I couldn’t tell which one was my husband,” Khatu said. “I tried to see more, but the stench was overwhelming and the soldiers were still at the school,” he said.
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.