YANGON: Rohingya militants massacred Hindu villagers during last year’s uprising in Myanmar’s Rakhine, Amnesty Inter­national said on Tuesday in a report that sheds fresh light on the complex ethnic rivalries in the state.

The killings took place on Aug 25, 2017, the report said, the same day that the Rohingya insurgents staged coordinated deadly raids on police posts that tipped the state into crisis.

Myanmar’s military responded to the insurgent raids with harsh reprisals.

The UN says the army crackdown amounted to “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya, with soldiers and vigilante mobs accused of killing civilians and burning down villages.

But the Rohingya militants have also been accused of abuses.

Those include the mass killing of Hindus in the far north of Rakhine, where the military took reporters — including AFP — to witness the exhumation of putrid bodies from a grave in September.

The militants, known as the Arakan Rohingya Salv­a­tion Army (ARSA), denied responsibility at the time.

But Amnesty Internati­onal said on Tuesday that a new investigation had confirmed the group killed 53 Hindus “execution-style” — mostly children — in the Kha Maung Seik village cluster in northern Maungdaw.

Published in Dawn, May 23rd, 2018