>A boat carrying Rohingya refugees from Myanmar capsized with more than 60 people presumed dead, compounding the ongoing tradegy there.
Half a million Rohingya have crushed into camps in Bangladesh in just over a month, fleeing a Myanmar army campaign and communal violence that the UN describes as "ethnic cleansing."
They have poured over on foot or crossed the Naf river which bisects the two countries in overcrowded boats.
One of them capsized in rough waters on Thursday agonizingly close to the shore, survivors said, as the boat's Bangladeshi captain lost control of the vessel after pushing far out to sea for two days to avoid patrols.
The bodies of 23 people have been retrieved so far but the death toll is expected to surge to around 60, with many of the dead likely to be young children too weak to swim through the heavy waves.
"Forty are missing and presumed drowned," International Organization for Migration spokesman Joel Millman told reporters in Geneva.
Survivor Abdus Salam told AFP the captain steered the boat into trouble within striking distance of the Bangladeshi coastline.
"He didn't see a rock underneath the water and we hit it."
In distressing scenes, refugees on Friday held funerals for loved ones — among them children — who had hoped to find sanctuary from violence that has cut through their homeland in Rakhine state.
A woman carried a small white bundle to a grave for a Muslim burial, while male relatives wept at a school building where bodies had been laid out.
"My wife and two boys survived, but I lost my three daughters," Shona Miah, 32, told AFP.
