Myanmar's military junta has extended opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest for another 12 months, a Home Ministry source said yesterday.
The source said officials from the military government had visited Suu Kyi in her Yangon home to read her a statement outlining the decision, which came exactly one year after she received a similar 12-month extension of her detention.
U Lwin, a spokesman for Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, which won a landslide election victory in 1990 only to be denied power by the army, said they had been kept in the dark about any possible extension.
However, a repeat of last November's one-year decision had been expected, he said.
U Lwin, who himself has been under house arrest three times in the past, noted that yesterday was the day when a previous one-year detention order would expire.
"According to the procedure, if there is an extension, today would be the day," he said.
"The whole world has been calling for [the] release of Suu Kyi, but the government has not been responding to any of the calls," said U Lwin, referring to appeals from world leaders for the release of the Nobel peace laureate.
Detention orders come into force when they are delivered and read to the detainee.
Reporters observed a police car entering Suu Kyi's compound at about 9:45am yesterday and departing several minutes later.
The street outside, which is normally open to limited traffic in daylight hours, was closed from 8:30am, and reopened about 25 minutes after the police car departed. More than 20 plainclothes police were deployed nearby.
No one emerged from the house after the police car left, and security personnel remained in the vicinity.
Typically in one of the most secretive countries in the world, there was some confusion as to the exact terms of the extension, with no official word from the government and another home ministry source saying it might only be six months.
Suu Kyi, 60, has spent around 10 of the last 15 years either in prison or under house arrest.
Her latest period in custody started on May 30, 2003 after pro-junta demonstrators attacked Suu Kyi's convoy as she traveled in the countryside north of the capital.
As part of a seven-step "road map to democracy," a National Convention to draw up a new constitution is due to restart on Dec. 5, although diplomats and analysts have dismissed the junta-dominated negotiations as a sham.
Suu Kyi's party, allowed to field just a handful of delegates out of more than 1,000, has chosen to take no part in the convention.
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
Chinese authorities are snuffing out any remembrance of the deadly 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which happened 37 years ago yesterday, in a further tightening of a years-long campaign to erase what happened from public memory. Police told relatives of the victims they would not be allowed to visit a cemetery in Beijing on the anniversary of the crackdown, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Relatives of the victims visited the cemetery on the anniversary for more than 30 years to read memorial statements with police keeping watch, Amnesty International said. Hundreds of people,
RSS