Six people suffered minor injuries after a small bomb detonated yesterday at a bus stop outside City Hall in Myanmar’s main commercial city Yangon, a police official said.
The blast hit in the morning near a park in the downtown area, the latest in a series of explosions in the military-ruled country this month.
“It was a small bomb blast. Altogether six people were slightly injured ... They were sent to the hospital,” said the police official, who did not want to be named as he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Military and police officials swiftly sealed off the area and urged crowds gathered at the scene to disperse.
“I heard the blast,” said one vendor near the park. “It was very loud.”
On Sept. 11, two people were killed and another 10 wounded by two bomb blasts at a video cafe northeast of Yangon, near a region hit by an ethnic insurgency, state media reported.
Those blasts followed an explosion days earlier on a Yangon bus that injured three people.
Myanmar’s junta has in the past blamed similar blasts on armed exile groups or ethnic rebels who have been battling the military rulers for decades, but the regime has also started pointing the finger at democracy activists.
State-run media earlier this month accused two members of detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) of bombing pro-government offices in July.
The NLD won a landslide victory in elections in 1990, but the junta never allowed it to take office and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest almost constantly since.
The military has ruled Myanmar since 1962, partly justifying its grip on power by claiming the need to fend off ethnic rebellions.
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