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Rohingya toddler found at sea dies

Written By Unknown on Sunday, 24 May 2015 | 22:28


LANGSA (Indonesia) – Beneath the swaying banana trees, there is ­nothing but a few plants to mark the resting place of three-year-old Shahira Bibi and the horror of the final weeks of her short life, at sea on a migrant boat.
When the tiny Rohingya girl from Myanmar was finally rescued from the sinking vessel off Indonesia’s western Aceh province, her body was already wracked with spasms and weighed no more than a six-month-old baby.
Some 100 people had already died onboard when clashes broke out between Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants over the meagre rations of food and water left after weeks adrift.
As the fighting escalated, the boat started to go down – but fishermen spotted the desperate migrants off Aceh just in time, and ferried them to shore on May 15.
 Shahira was taken to hospital, but by then she was already desperately ill and there was little the medical team could do to save her.
Her death Wednesday is the latest tragic tale from a migrant crisis that has seen more than 3,500 boat people arrive in Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia in the past two weeks.
“Deep inside my heart, I am very sad,” her mother Mimi said, describing how she has cried constantly since losing her daughter.
Now she is trying to stay strong for her other daughter, four-year-old Asma, who was also on the boat.
“If I look sad, Asma will cry, so I am laughing with her,” said 25-year-old Mimi, who goes by one name.
Like thousands of Muslim Rohingya fleeing persecution in Buddhist Myanmar, the family had been trying to make their way to relatively affluent Malaysia where Mimi’s husband is working.
But a clampdown by Thailand, where many stop before travelling overland to Malaysia, disrupted long-established people-smuggling routes and the boat carrying the family and hundreds of others was abandoned by its crew. – AFP
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