At least 41 people have died since Cyclone Mocha swept through Myanmar’s Rakhine state, local officials said today.

“We can confirm that there are 17 dead,” said Carlo, an official from Bou Ma village, two days after Mocha passed.

“There will be more dead because more than a hundred people are missing,” he added.

The 17 dead are in addition to the 24 reported by officials in the neighboring village of Houng Doke Kar.

The leaders of the military junta in Myanmar have announced for their part that there are five dead and an unspecified number of injured, while 864 houses and 14 hospitals or clinics have been damaged.

With winds of up to 195 kilometers per hour, the strongest cyclone to be recorded in the region in more than a decade, Mocha, on Sunday hit Sittwe, capital of Rakhine state, and Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, where they have taken refuge hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslim refugees.

Communication with Sittwe, home to about 150,000 people, remained difficult yesterday, Monday.

According to the UN, problems with telecommunications do not yet allow an assessment of the extent of the damage in Rakhine state, where members of the Rohingya minority live mainly.

“The first information suggests that the damage is serious,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Sunday evening.

Camps

In Bangladesh, where authorities evacuated 750,000 people from their homes, a government official assured that there were no deaths from the cyclone’s passage.

But the country is facing its worst power outages in seven months as Mocha forced both floating liquefied natural gas terminals to suspend operations.

Meanwhile in makeshift Rohingya camps — where nearly a million people live in makeshift accommodation — damage is also limited and there have been no casualties.

“The effects of the cyclone could be much more severe, but refugee camps have been significantly affected and thousands of people are in immediate need of assistance,” the UN warned, however.

“Cyclone Mocha was the most powerful storm to hit Bangladesh since Sidr,” the head of the Bangladesh Meteorological Service had noted.

In November 2007, Cyclone Sidr killed more than 3,000 people and caused billions of dollars in damage.