• At least 150 Rohingya refugees stuck on boat.
• The UN made its request on Friday, but no one has answered yet.
• The boat is now in Indian waters near the Nicobar Islands.

The UN is asking South East Asian countries near the Andaman Sea to help a boat with at least 150 Rohingya refugees on it that has been drifting for two weeks without power.

People on the boat who have been in touch with the outside world through a satellite phone say that some passengers, including children, have already died.

They said that there was no more food or water.

The UN made its request on Friday, but no one has answered yet.

The small fishing boat left southern Bangladesh last month and has been at sea for more than three weeks. People on the boat may have been trying to get to Malaysia.

The boat is open and has little cover, and it looks like the engine broke down a few days after it left.

It has gone hundreds of kilometres off course and is now in Indian waters near the Nicobar Islands.

On Sunday, a person who works to help Rohingya in Bangladesh got in touch with someone on the boat.

“We’re all going to die here,” the refugee said, adding that no one had eaten for more than a week.

The Rohingya are an ethnic minority in Myanmar. In 2017, many Rohingya people fled to Bangladesh to avoid a genocide campaign started by the Burmese military.

After the monsoon season is over, many Rohingya try to leave the overcrowded refugee camps in southern Bangladesh by taking dangerous sea trips.

Their numbers have grown because conditions in the camps are getting worse, and more Rohingya who are still in Myanmar are also trying to leave since last year’s military coup.
We know that at least five boats have left in the last two months.

One of them, with more than 100 Rohingya on board, was saved by Sri Lanka’s navy Sunday evening off the island’s northern coast.

There were women and children in the group. A navy spokesman said that four sick people were taken to the hospital.

No one knew where that group started their trip or where they were trying to go.

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