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.
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