Bengali Hindus in Maungdaw District numbered roughly 5,000 people -- about one percent of the local population. They lived in small agricultural settlements alongside much larger Muslim communities, practicing their faith in a landscape dominated by other religions and other conflicts. Unlike the Rohingya Muslims, whose citizenship Myanmar's government had stripped away, Bengali Hindus held identity cards issued by Myanmar authorities. These cards were meant to mark their legal place in a country that policed identity with bureaucratic precision. On the morning of 25 August, those cards became a trigger. The attackers, eyewitnesses said, specifically objected to the Hindu villagers' identity documents, demanding they should not possess them. What should have been proof of belonging became instead a reason for slaughter.

Eyewitnesses described the attackers as men in black masks who spoke multiple languages, including the dialect shared by Rohingya and Hindu communities in the region. They moved through the village cluster known locally as Fwaira Bazar or Fakira Bazar, rounding up villagers. Three pits were dug. The killing was methodical -- survivors described victims hacked to death before being thrown into the graves. Of those who survived, some did so by being taken rather than killed. Four Hindu women later told Agence France-Presse from Bangladesh that they were among eight women spared on the condition that they marry their captors. These women were then transported across the border into Rohingya refugee camps. Forced marriage as an alternative to execution: this was the calculus of survival imposed on the women of Kha Maung Seik.

The massacre went largely unnoticed for weeks. Rakhine State was consumed by a much larger crisis -- the Myanmar military's campaign against Rohingya communities, which drove hundreds of thousands across the border into Bangladesh beginning on the same day. In the chaos, the killings at Kha Maung Seik were lost. Then came the phone call from one of the abducted women, and on 13 September 2017, Kyaw Zaw Oo, a Rakhine State Hluttaw member of parliament, posted a detailed account of the massacre on his Facebook page, alerting both domestic and international audiences. On 25 September, a search party of Myanmar army soldiers, police, and a local Hindu leader found 17 more bodies in two mud pits roughly 400 meters northeast of the first graves. The corpses were men, aged between 30 and 50. In total, the remains of 45 people were recovered -- most of them women and children.

In May 2018, Amnesty International published a report based on dozens of interviews in Rakhine State and Bangladesh, along with photographic evidence reviewed by forensic pathologists, attributing the massacre to ARSA. Tirana Hassan, Amnesty's Crisis Response Director, described the killings as a "brutal and senseless act" in which ARSA members "captured scores of Hindu women, men, and children and terrorised them before slaughtering them outside their own villages." ARSA rejected the report, calling it "unjustifiable and careless" and demanding an international investigation. They accused Buddhist nationalists of committing the killings and framing Rohingya Muslims. The dispute over responsibility became another layer of the conflict -- each side pointing at the other while 99 people remained dead and their surviving relatives scattered across refugee camps and monasteries in Myanmar and Bangladesh.

The aftermath sent Hindu communities fleeing along every available route. Three thousand Hindus from Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships were internally displaced within Myanmar. Five hundred crossed into Bangladesh, where local Bengali Hindus from Ukhia Upazila in Cox's Bazar District found them sheltering in forests and brought them to a Hindu temple. A poultry farm was converted into a makeshift refugee camp housing around 300 people. In Sittwe, more than 500 Hindus took refuge in four Hindu temples with partial support from Myanmar's government. Others sheltered in Buddhist monasteries in Ponnagyun and Kyauktaw townships. The survivors carried a particular kind of displacement -- driven from their homes not by the military forces that targeted their Rohingya neighbors, but by insurgents claiming to fight on behalf of the Rohingya. Caught between a state that persecuted one minority and militants who persecuted another, the Bengali Hindus of Kha Maung Seik found safety only in the charity of strangers.