Record number of Rohingya refugees died at sea in 2025: UNHCR 17 April 2026 Peace and Security In 2025, nearly 900 Rohingya refugees were reported missing or dead in the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal, making it the deadliest year on record in South and Southeast Asia, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said on Friday. Some 5,000 Rohingya refugees are believed to have drowned at sea over approximately the last decade.  “This makes, sadly, the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal an unmarked graveyard for thousands of desperate Rohingya refugees,”  said UNHCR spokesperson Babar Baloch, speaking in Geneva. Since 2012, nearly 200,000 Rohingya refugees have risked their lives on dangerous sea journeys to escape misery and persecution. In 2017, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled Myanmar for Bangladesh, amid persecution characterized as a “ textbook example of ethnic cleansing ” by the then UN human rights chief , Zeid Ra‘ad al-Hussein.…