Border News Agency
Maungdaw, September 8.

Villagers confirmed that ten cows belonging to residents of Kine Gyi Village, Maungdaw Township, went missing near the base of Mayu Mountain in the first week of September.

The villagers said that the cows are usually released to graze near the foot of Mayu Mountain during the day and return from the forest edge near the mountain in the evening.

However, in the first week of September, the ten cows did not return, so when the villagers went searching for them, they only found bloodstains and scattered bones, indicating the cows had been slaughtered, according to residents of Kine Gyi Village.

“When we realized that more than ten of our village’s cows had gone missing, we gathered people and went deep into the forest to search for them. What we found were the remains of slaughtered cows—we even saw the bloodstains,” a villager from Kine Gyi who joined the search told Border News Agency.

Villagers from Kine Gyi said that while buffaloes and cows had occasionally gone missing near the foot of Mayu Mountain in the past, it was usually just one or two at a time, and there had never been a case where five or even ten disappeared at once like this.

They added that Rohingya extremists had long been stationed in the Mayu Mountain area, and they suspect that the ten missing cows were captured, slaughtered, and eaten by these armed extremists.

“Our villagers believe that ARSA killed and ate the cows. There used to be places inside the Kine Gyi forest where ARSA members had set up camps in the past. The disappearance of these ten cows is definitely not an ordinary case,” a resident of Kine Gyi Village told Border News Agency.

Some villagers accused that the ten cows had been sold to Rohingya extremists as provisions. However, the cattle owners denied the allegation, insisting that the cows were truly missing and had been slaughtered, and that they were not sold to the armed extremist group as supplies.

In addition, residents of Maungdaw said that in some villages of the township, buffaloes and cows often go missing, but they are rarely found or recovered.

Muslim villagers confirmed that hundreds of Rohingya armed extremists are based inside Mayu Mountain, including areas near Muslim villages in Maungdaw Township.

According to residents of Maungdaw, the Arakan People’s Revolutionary Government has officially opened a market for selling buffaloes, cows, and goats to Bangladesh along the Arakan-Bangladesh border in Maungdaw Township.

However, they said that there are still people illegally smuggling and selling buffaloes, cows, and goats to Bangladesh, as well as armed groups stealing livestock in organized gangs.