Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, on Wednesday blamed “terrorists’’ for “a huge iceberg of misinformation’’ on the violence in Rakhine state.

However, she was silent on the nearly 126,000 Rohingya Muslims who have fled over the border to Bangladesh since Aug. 25.

The leader of Buddhist-majority Myanmar has come under pressure from countries with Muslim populations over the crisis.

The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of the risk of ethnic cleansing and regional destabilisation.

In a rare letter expressing concern that the violence that has raged for nearly two weeks in the northwestern state could spiral into a “humanitarian catastrophe’’, Guterres urged the UN Security Council to press for restraint and calm.

Suu Kyi spoke by telephone with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who has pressed world leaders to do more to help and said that a population of roughly 1.1 million faced genocide.

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In a statement issued by her office on Facebook, Suu Kyi said the government had “already started defending all the people in Rakhine in the best way possible’’

She warned against misinformation that could mar relations with other countries.

She referred to images on Twitter of killings posted by Turkey’s deputy prime minister that he later deleted because they were not from Myanmar.

“She said that kind of fake information which was inflicted on the deputy prime minister was simply the tip of a huge iceberg of misinformation calculated to create a lot of problems between different countries and with the aim of promoting the interests of the terrorists,’’ her office said in the statement.

(Source: Reuters/NAN)