He said that Rohingyas first started going on boats to south-east Asia in the 1990s.
The United Nations refugee agency says there are about 25, 000 Rohingyas registered in Malaysia.
The Rohingyas originally came from Bengal to what was then Burma when both were parts of Britain's vast Indian empire.
Some 28, 000 Rohingyas have official refugee status, and live in two camps run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
In Bangladesh, border officials said they believed several boats with Rohingyas on board were waiting to try to cross the river from Burma.
They already compete for food, land and jobs with more than 200, 000 stateless Rohingyas, who live around Cox's Bazar, one of the poorest parts of Bangladesh.
In Bangladesh's tourist zone of Cox's Bazar, local officials and humanitarian agencies were concerned about the estimated 250, 000 Rohingyas from Myanmar who live in squalid, makeshift huts along the shoreline.
Dozens are feared to have perished in two separate incidents earlier this year when boats carrying hundreds of Rohingyas capsized in the Bay of Bengal and off the Bangladeshi coast.
For years the fear of a large-scale exodus from Myanmar, as happened in 1978 and again in 1991-92, has scuppered efforts by international agencies to nudge Bangladesh's government into improving the lot of the Rohingyas.
Government statistics estimate that about 4% of Myanmar's population of 60 million is Muslim, but scholars say it could be as high as 10% since the official count doesn't include ethnic groups such as the Rohingyas.
This week Thailand was still dodging questions from the United Nations' refugee agency about a further 126 Rohingyas whom the UN believes Thailand recently had in its custody but who may also have been dumped at sea.
Zahid Hasan, commanding officer of Border Guards' 42 Battalion in Teknaf, on Bangladesh's southeastern tip, said 21 bodies were recovered Thursday afternoon from the sea, apparently from an accident earlier in the week when several boats carrying more than 100 Rohingyas trying to flee the cyclone had capsized.
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