“The search ended on Thursday. All Rohingya refugees on top of the boat yesterday have been rescued,” Muhammad Fathur Rachman, an official from the search and rescue agency in Aceh, said through a spokesperson.The people rescued included 40 men, 18 women and 11 children who were found off Aceh Province on Thursday.Six others, including four women and two men, were rescued by fishermen a day earlier.But rescuer Rachman said there was “no additional information that we received about missing persons, and there is no manifest of the boat”.”Our analysis is the boat cannot hold 150 people.”A protection associate for the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), Faisal Rahman, told AFP that one of the survivors said “the boat took 151 people — once the boat capsized, approximately around 50 people (were) maybe missing and passed away”.Local anger At least eight of the refugees were hospitalised on Thursday evening. The search and rescue agency said they were admitted for dehydration.The others were taken to a temporary shelter at an old Red Cross building in a village near West Aceh district capital Meulaboh.Survivors said they had travelled from Bangladesh where many have fled into squalid camps to escape persecution at home. Some said they were trying to reach Malaysia via Indonesia.Many Rohingya make the perilous 4,000-kilometre journey (2,500 miles) from Bangladesh to Malaysia, fuelling a multi-million dollar human-smuggling operation that often involves stopovers in Indonesia.At the temporary shelter, many of the refugees were eating food cooked by locals, who also gave them used clothes, according to an AFP journalist.Some were sleeping on a tarpaulin sheet on the floor, using sarongs as blankets.At dawn, refugees were taking part in morning prayer using donated Korans.But some locals protested their arrival, unfurling a banner that said they rejected the Rohingya being there.
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