THE official death toll from the powerful cyclone that struck Myanmar has reached at least 145, including 117 members of the Muslim Rohingya minority, state television reported today.

According to the report, the figure applied to the western state of Rakhine, where Cyclone Mocha did the most damage, but the TV news did not say how many storm-related deaths there had been elsewhere in the country.

The accounting of casualties from the cyclone has been slow, in part due to communications being hit by the storm as well as the military government’s tight control over information. 

The junta has insisted that unofficial reports of death tolls surpassing 400 are false, but uncertainty remains about the actual extent of casualties and destruction.

On Thursday, the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs said: “Coastal Rakhine took the heaviest hit from the cyclone, with severe impacts across the north-west and some damage in Kachin [state] also reported.”

Today’s report on MRTV state television said that four soldiers and 24 local residents in Rakhine, in addition to the 117 Rohingya, had been killed.

The Rohingyas caught in the storm lived mostly in crowded displacement camps, to which they were moved after losing their homes in a brutal 2017 counterinsurgency campaign by Myanmar’s security forces.