A boat carrying members of the Rohingya community from Myanmar has sunk near the Thai-Malaysian border, with hundreds missing, seven dead and 13 rescued, the Malaysian maritime agency said on Sunday, Reuters reported.

Rescuers were combing an area of 170 square nautical miles near Langkawi island on Saturday after a boat with 300 people on board left Myanmar's Rakhine state three days earlier, said the maritime agency head for the area Romli Mustafa.

Myanmar's impoverished Rakhine state has suffered years of conflict, hunger and ethnic violence mostly targeting the Rohingya Muslim minority community. Driven out of Rakhine state following a brutal 2017 military crackdown, some 1.3 million Rohingya live as refugees in densely-packed camps in neighbouring Bangladesh, according to Reuters.