THANLYIN (Myanmar) — Nearly 1,500 Myanmar migrants from Malaysia arrived in their war-torn home country today, a Myanmar Navy official said, returned under an opaque repatriation scheme.

Three ships carrying Myanmar migrants had all docked at the Myanmar Navy base in Thanlyin just before 7.30am (0100 GMT/8.30am Malaysian time), said the naval official who AFP has kept anonymous as he was not authorised to speak to media.

Hundreds of families were gathered at dawn to collect their relatives outside the base, where cars, taxis and buses were parked in ranks preparing to take them away, AFP journalists saw.

Kyaw Myint, 55, told AFP he was there to collect three grandchildren who had been in Malaysian detention for one and a half years, and who he has not seen in six years.

“Since they arrived in prison we lost contact with them,” he said.

Now Kyaw Myint is worried about them being conscripted — “not only by the military but also by ethnic armed groups”, he added.

There are also concerns members of the persecuted Rohingya are among the returned group, after Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim announced the repatriations against a backdrop of anti-Rohingya sentiment, but this has not been confirmed.

The three Myanmar Navy ships left Malaysia on Tuesday carrying 1,476 migrants, according to the Myanmar government — the first of 5,000 that Anwar says Myanmar agreed to take back.

But the United Nations (UN) warns conditions in Myanmar, which has been consumed by civil war since a 2021 military coup, mean safe homecomings cannot be guaranteed as required under international law.

“We have no idea how his life will be back in Myanmar,” said the 25-year-old sister of one migrant, who told his family he expected to be sent aboard the ships.