YANGON, Oct 5 — Myanmar has repatriated nearly 10,000 migrants from Malaysia this year, state media said on Monday, a day after a flotilla returning almost 1,500 of its citizens docked in the country.

The United Nations (UN) has sharply criticised Malaysia’s push to return migrants to Myanmar under an opaque scheme it says cannot guarantee safe homecomings to the war-torn nation.

A group of 1,476 returnees arrived by ship outside Yangon on Sunday, the first of 5,000 that Kuala Lumpur says Myanmar agreed to take back amid a wave of anti-migrant sentiment in Malaysia.

Rights monitors have raised concerns that members of the Rohingya minority may be sent back to Myanmar, where they have faced violent persecution, but Malaysia has not commented on the ethnicities of returnees.