MYANMAR EXECUTES FOUR PRO-DEMOCRACY ACTIVISTS

Mon 25 July 2022:

On Monday, the military junta in Myanmar executed four people, including prominent political activists, according to a regime spokesperson.

According to a local news website, the military regime executed people over the weekend but refused to give their families access to the bodies. The website also noted that Jimmy Kyaw Min Yu, Phyo Zayar Thaw, Hla Myo Aung, and Aung Thura Zaw were detained last year.

Global New Light, a mouthpiece for Myanmar’s Junta, claims that on March 14, 2021, the four were accused of committing “brutal murdering cases.”

Kyaw Min Yu, 53, was a veteran of the 1988 pro-democracy uprising in the Buddhist-majority nation, while Phyo Zeya Thaw, a 41-year-old ally of ousted Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi and National League for Democracy lawmaker, lost their appeals against the sentences in June, the website reported.

It is for the first time since the 1980s that Myanmar has carried out executions.

The junta accused the four of “giving directives, made arrangements, and committed conspiracies for brutal and inhumane terror acts such as murdering many innocent people,” the report claimed.

Following their arrest, the report said: “Relevant military tribunals charged them for their cases under relevant sections of the counter-terrorism law and the penal code and handed down the death sentence each to those four culprits.”

“The punishment has been conducted under the prison’s procedures,” it added.

According to the Myanmar Now news website, the four slain prisoners were only allowed to meet their families at the Insein Prison in Yangon on Friday through a video link.

The families were allowed to visit the prison, but the meeting was held online, the news outlet reported, adding that Junta officials told the families they “should not return to the prison to bring food or medicines for the prisoners.”

“The next morning, all four prisoners were reportedly executed on the prison’s grounds,” the report said, adding that the bodies were cremated at Yangon’s Htein Pin cemetery later the same day.

Soon after learning of the executions, the lawyers for Jimmy and Thaw’s families sought information from prison authorities, which was allegedly denied, the online news outlet said.

“Prison officials refused to say when the executions were carried out. When the families asked if they could collect the bodies, the officials said they were not required under the law to release them,” the report claimed, citing sources close to the family.

“They (families) won’t be holding funerals for them,” the report said, adding the families refuse to accept that “their loved ones had been killed by the regime.”

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