Twenty homes caught fire and a bomb was detonated near a mosque in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, the government said yesterday, the latest unrest in a region that has seen hundreds of thousands of Rohinyga Muslims flee in under a month, reports AFP. The violence comes days after Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi declared that the military had ceased its “clearance operations” in the border area. The army claims it is trying to flush out Rohingya militants who attacked police

posts on August 25. But civilian refugees streaming into Bangladesh say they were terrorised by soldiers and vigilante Buddhist mobs who torched their villages to the ground.

The testimony, alongside satellite images of some 200 villages reduced to ash, have fuelled accusations that Myanmar’s army is systematically purging a Muslim minority haunted by years of persecution. The UN has described the military campaign as “ethnic cleansing”.

The latest violence saw 20 homes catch fire in Maungdaw’s Kyain Chaung village on Thursday night, according to a statement posted by the government’s Information Committee.

“Security members went and checked the fire and are investigating its cause,” said the statement, adding that the flames burned through a community previously hit by fire.

The following morning a bomb detonated outside of a mosque in Mi Chaung Zay village in nearby Buthidaung township, according to the government.

The statement said “terrorists” were to blame for the blast, without specifying if they were linked to the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) -- the Rohingya militant group behind the ambushes on police posts. No deaths or injuries were reported in either incident.