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.
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘NO AMNESTY’: Tens of thousands of people joined the rally against a bill that would slash the former president’s prison term; President Lula has said he would veto the bill Tens of thousands of Brazilians on Sunday demonstrated against a bill that advanced in Congress this week that would reduce the time former president Jair Bolsonaro spends behind bars following his sentence of more than 27 years for attempting a coup. Protests took place in the capital, Brasilia, and in other major cities across the nation, including Sao Paulo, Florianopolis, Salvador and Recife. On Copacabana’s boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro, crowds composed of left-wing voters chanted “No amnesty” and “Out with Hugo Motta,” a reference to the speaker of the lower house, which approved the bill on Wednesday last week. It is
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
Cozy knits, sparkly bobbles and Santa hats were all the canine rage on Sunday, as hundreds of sausage dogs and their owners converged on central London for an annual parade and get-together. The dachshunds’ gathering in London’s Hyde Park came after a previous “Sausage Walk” planned for Halloween had to be postponed, because it had become so popular organizers needed to apply for an events licence. “It was going to be too much fun so they canceled it,” laughed Nicky Bailey, the owner of three sausage dogs: Una and her two 19-week-old puppies Ember and Finnegan, wearing matching red coats and silver
RSS