SITTWE: More than 700 migrants found adrift on a fishing boat six days ago disembarked in Myanmar`s western state of Rakhine on Wednesday as the US warned it was monitoring their fate `very closely`.

Before they were intercepted the migrants had been heading south towards Malaysia, which along with Indonesia and Thailand has seen 3,500hungry people arrive in recent weeks in a migrant crisis that erupted after a crackdown on people-smuggling.

Most were members of Myanmar`s Muslim Rohingya minority fleeing persecution in Rakhine, or economic migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh.

Most of Myanmar`s 1.3 million Rohingya have no citizenship and areconsidered by the government to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

Myanmar`s navy has found hundreds more migrants in its own waters and appears determined to foist them off onto Bangladesh, although officials there are resisting mass deportations across the frontier. Myanmar said the 727 passengers found aboard the vessel last Friday were `Bengalis` the term it uses to describe its Rohingya and initially threatened to send them across the border before the navy escorted them towards Rakhine.

`They arrived this morning at around 9.30am` in Maungdaw district, a local government official, who did not want to be named, said.

Authorities planned to move them to the nearby village of Taungpyo Letwe close to the Bangladesh border, where an earlier group of 200 migrants rescued off Myanmar are being held while their nationalities are verified.

Another unnamed official in the Rakhine state capital Sittwe said that group of 200 migrants would be sent to Bangladesh in coming days.

`Bangladesh agreed today to accept them,` the official said.

But a spokesman for Bangladesh`s border guards said Myanmar officials had yet to definitively show they were Bangladeshis, adding that they had only received an `incomplete list` of passengers.-AFP