Following dozens of interviews with victims and forensic analysis, New York-based AI found that the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) was responsible for the massacres of up to 99 Hindus in two villages in Myanmar's Rakhine State in August 2017.

One of the two attacks on Hindus took place on the same day as ARSA attacks on Myanmar police posts that led to a massive security crackdown by the country's authorities marked by killings, rape and torture of Muslim Rohingyas, forcing more than 600,000 Rohingyas to flee to neighboring Bangladesh, where they remain today.

"Accountability for these atrocities is every bit as crucial as it is for the crimes against humanity carried out by Myanmar's security forces in northern Rakhine State," said Tirana Hassan, AI's crisis response director, in a press statement obtained by The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.

“ARSA’s appalling attacks were followed by the Myanmar military’s ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya population as a whole. Both must be condemned – human rights violations or abuses by one side never justify abuses or violations by the other,” Hassan said.

ARSA, also known as Harakah al-Yaqin, or "The Faith Movement", was established in 2012 and consists of trained militants, estimated to be in the hundreds, with access to small firearms and some homemade bombs.

The first attack took place at around 8 a.m. on Aug. 25 in Kha Maung Seik village, where Hindus, at the time of the attack, lived close to predominantly Muslim Rohingya villagers and Buddhist villagers, the AI report said.

ARSA militants assembled 69 Hindu men, women and children who were in the village at the time, robbing, binding and blindfolding them before killing 53 of the Hindus according to the AI report.

Myanmar security forces accompany Hindu villagers to the site of mass graves where their relatives were buried. The bodies of 45 people from Ah Nauk Kha Maung Seik (in Maungdaw township, Rakhine State) were unearthed in four mass graves in late September 2017. The victims were among 100 people killed in two massacres perpetrated by Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) fighters on 25 August 2017. (Courtesy of/Amnesty International)

AI also found that 46 Hindus in the neighboring Ye Bauk Kyar village had disappeared on the same day as the Kha Maung Seik massacre, putting the total believed casualties at 99, as Hindu community members in Rakhine presume that the disappearing Hindus were massacred by the same ARSA militants, the AI report said.

AI also found that ARSA fighters had killed six Hindus near a village called Myo Thu Gyi on Aug. 26. The six victims were part of an extended family of twelve who had fled from U Daung village tract, in Maungdaw township, after ARSA fighters threatened them the day before.

Survivors of the ARSA killings are still badly traumatized by the events, said AI's Hassan.

"It's hard to ignore the sheer brutality of ARSA's actions, which have left an indelible impression on the survivors we've spoken to," said Hassan.

"My uncle, my father, my brother -- they were all slaughtered," Raj Kumari, 18, one of the survivors from the Kha Maung Seik massacre, told AI.

Hassan said: "The full extent of ARSA's abuses and the Myanmar military's violations will not be known until independent human rights investigators, including the UN-Fact-Finding mission, are given full and unfettered access to Rakhine state." (ahw)