Fifteen dead and 400 missing after blaze rips through world’s biggest Rohingya camp in Bangladesh

More than 45,000 Rohingya people have also been displaced by the fire in the camp in Bangladesh

Rohingya refugees stand at the site of Monday's fire at a refugee camp in Balukhali, southern Bangladesh, Tuesday (AP)

The death toll from a huge blaze that tore through the world's biggest Rohingya refugee camp has risen to 15 with 400 people missing, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) confirmed Tuesday.

The UNHCR representative in Bangladesh, Johannes van der Klaauw, said another 560 people have been injured and 45,000 displaced in the “massive” and “devastating” blaze.

“What we have seen ... something we have never seen before in these camps,” Mr Klaauw said. “We still have 400 people unaccounted for, maybe somewhere in the rubble.”

The Bangladesh government has launched an investigation into the biggest fire that has hit the settlement of one million Rohingya refugees at Cox’s Bazar camp in the southeastern part of the country.

A committee has been formed to investigate the causes of the fire, which is still unknown.

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The Rohingyas are an ethnic minority group that fled Myanmar in 2017 amid a military crackdown with what UN investigators call “genocidal intent”, a charge denied by Myanmar.

According to officials, the fire started on Monday in one of the 34 camps before it engulfed two other camps. The blaze killed two children. The fire was controlled after almost six hours.

Video from the site showed thick columns of smoke billowing from the camps while hundreds of firefighters battled to douse the fire and evacuate people.

Witnesses told local media that several people got trapped in the barbed wire fencing around the camp while trying to escape. It was the third incident of fire in the camps in four days, a fire brigade official told AFP.

Earlier in January, two huge blazes left thousands of properties destroyed, including four Unicef schools.

Saad Hammadi, Amnesty International’s South Asia campaigner, said in a tweet that the “frequency of fire in the camps is too coincidental, especially when outcomes of previous investigations into the incidents are not known and they keep repeating”.