Hundreds of Rohingya Missing from Indonesian Refugee Camp

Just 112 refugees remain at the makeshift camp in Lhokseumawe on Indonesia's northern coast this week, well down from the almost 400 that arrived between June and September last year.

Neither local authorities nor the United Nations [UN] could account for the whereabouts of the refugees from the stateless Muslim minority from Myanmar, who are feared to have enlisted traffickers to help them cross the Malacca strait into Malaysia.

"We don't know yet where they went," said Ridwan Jamil, head of the Rohingya taskforce in Lhokseumawe. "But they'll escape if they can find any hole to leave because that is their goal."

A Myanmar military crackdown in 2017, which UN investigators said amounted to genocide, forced 750,000 Rohingya to flee across the border into Bangladesh's southeast coastal district of Cox's Bazar, where many ended up in sprawling refugee camps.

Thousands have since paid smugglers to get them out of Bangladesh, enduring harrowing, months-long sea journeys punctuated by illness, beatings by traffickers and near starvation rations to reach Indonesia and Malaysia.

At least 18 Rohingya from the Lhokseumawe camp and over a dozen suspected traffickers were recently apprehended by police several hundred kilometers south in Medan city, a frequent staging point for illegal crossings into Malaysia, authorities said.

The refugees have been asked not to leave the camp, the UN's refugee agency said, given the risks involved in making the journey.