Refugee number could double with 146,000 of the persecuted Muslim minority already fleeing Myanmar's security forces.



As many as 300,000 Rohingya Muslims could flee violence in northwestern Myanmar to neighbouring Bangladesh, UN officials say, warning of a funding shortfall for emergency food supplies for the desperate refugees.

According to estimates issued by United Nations workers in Bangladesh's border region of Cox's Bazar, arrivals since the latest bloodshed started two weeks ago have already reached 146,000.

Numbers are difficult to establish with any certainty because of the turmoil as Rohingya escape operations by Myanmar's military.

However, UN officials have raised their estimate of the total expected refugees from 120,000 to 300,000, said Dipayan Bhattacharyya, who is Bangladesh spokesman for the World Food Programme (WFP).

"They are coming in nutritionally deprived, they have been cut off from a normal flow of food for possibly more than a month," he told Reuters news agency. "They were definitely visibly hungry, traumatised."