Police blamed the violence on Thursday night after 115 Rohingya and 16 people from Myanmar fled the facility.
Malaysia is searching for dozens of Rohingya refugees and other Myanmar people who escaped from a temporary immigration detention center in the country's north.
The Immigration Department said in a statement that 131 people escaped from the Bidor facility in the northern state of Perak on Thursday night, leaving one man dead. Perak state police said the man was hit by a car while trying to cross the north-south highway, and the men fled after violence at the camp.
Approximately 115 of the men were Rohingya and the remaining 16 were from other Myanmar ethnic groups.
Ruslin Jusseau, head of the Immigration Department, said 375 people, including police, soldiers and reserve volunteers, were called in to help with the search.
Malaysia is a popular destination for the Muslim-majority Rohingya people, whose brutal military crackdown in 2017 caused hundreds of thousands to flee Myanmar to neighboring Bangladesh, and which is now under the International Court of Justice. is the subject of a massacre investigation.
Many are making perilous journeys to Southeast Asia by boat to escape harsh conditions in refugee camps in Myanmar and Bangladesh. The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) said last month that some 569 people died or went missing at sea last year.
By the end of 2023, 88% of the 185,300 people registered with UNHCR as refugees and asylum seekers in Malaysia were from Myanmar.
Approximately 107,670 of the people registered with the agency are Rohingya who were stripped of their citizenship by the military regime in the 1980s. Some people from Myanmar have sought refuge in Malaysia amid the deepening civil war since the military seized power from the government of Aung San Suu Kyi three years ago.
Malaysia does not have a system to process asylum claims and refugees are considered illegal immigrants. Most live precarious lives, at risk of being arrested as “illegal immigrants” or exploited in low-wage jobs that Malaysians don't want.
Immigration authorities have reported accelerating their crackdown on illegal migrants in recent months, carrying out regular raids, while UNHCR has long continued to visit immigration detention centers to verify refugee status. are not allowed to do so.
In April 2022, more than 500 Rohingya refugees, including children, escaped from a temporary detention center in Penang state, and six died while trying to cross a highway.
The incident was also cited as a cause of riots.
