BANGKOK — A resurgence of religious violence in western Myanmar this week has left six Muslims dead and dozens of homes destroyed, a senior police officer said Wednesday.

The deaths and the burning of houses in and around the city of Thandwe occurred Tuesday, just hours before President Thein Sein arrived in the restive area on Wednesday as part of a scheduled visit to cool religious tensions and criticize “extremism.”

“There are casualties and damage on both sides,” Mr. Thein Sein said on state television.

But according to accounts from the police officer, Lt. Col Kyaw Tint, and a villager who witnessed some of the fighting, the violence followed a disturbingly familiar pattern: sword-wielding Buddhist mobs rampaging through Muslim neighborhoods.

“All the people who were found dead were from the Muslim community,” Colonel Kyaw Tint said.

After flaring up last year in western Myanmar, anti-Muslim violence has spread to areas around the country this year, leaving dozens of people dead, almost all of them Muslims and some of them children. Buddhist nationalist groups have called for a boycott of Muslim shops, and radical Buddhist monks have stoked anti-Muslim feelings in sermons across the country.