It was just before midnight on Monday when the crude time-bomb exploded in the ninth-floor guest room in the luxurious Traders Hotel in Myanmar’s biggest city, badly wounding a US tourist and showering the streets below with glass.
A police source said the explosion was part of a coordinated series of bomb attacks across Myanmar by an “organized group” targeting tourist haunts, a Buddhist temple and other public places.
It was the seventh blast since Friday last week and was followed by two more explosions early yesterday.
Photo: EPA
Soon after the bomb went off at the Traders in Yangon, another device exploded in the parking lot of the Shwe Pyitsone Hotel in Sagaing region and another at a pagoda, Sagaing police and a government official said. There were no casualties.
The bomb attacks are the latest violence in a year that has seen the euphoria over democratic reforms give way to sectarian attacks that have spread across Myanmar.
Anti-Muslim unrest simmered under the military junta that ran the country for nearly half a century, but the worst has occurred since the quasi-civilian government took power in March 2011.
However, police and diplomatic sources said it was not clear if the blasts were connected to the recent religious unrest.
“I think these blasts and aborted attempts were carried out by a systematically organized group,” said a police official in Yangon who declined to be identified because he is not authorized to speak to the media. “By the look of the devices they used, and the way they carried it out, they must have been trained in terrorist acts systematically.”
He said devices found in Mandalay and Yangon recently were made in the same way, with hand grenades.
Police are already investigating the series of bombings that began on Friday, when an explosion killed two people in a guesthouse in the town of Taungoo, about 55km from the capital, Naypyitaw.
There are few hotels with as much symbolic significance in Yangon as the 22-story, 334-room Traders, owned by billionaire Robert Kuok’s Shangri-La Asia. It is a hive of activity; businessmen, journalists, tourists and aid workers mingle in its lobby. Until this year, several UN agencies had offices there.
According to a witness and police, the bomb in the Traders appeared to go off in the bathroom in a room overlooking Sule Pagoda Road, a main thoroughfare.
“It sounded like a subdued explosion,” said Graeme Romer, a guest staying on the eighth floor.
He said he went downstairs to the lobby and saw an injured woman wrapped in sheets lying on the floor.
“She was bleeding profusely,” Romer said.
The woman was on holiday with her husband and two children who were not injured.
Two bombs exploded in Yangon on Saturday, according to police, one at a bus stop that caused no injuries and another that slightly wounded two boys. Police said they found an unexploded bomb in a Yangon restaurant on Monday.
Police said they had arrested four suspects in connection with the bomb attacks, including one identified as Saw Myint Lwin, 26. He was seen on closed-circuit television cameras at the Traders and arrested in Mon State, police said.
“These devices were obviously not intended to cause large numbers of casualties,” said Anthony Davis, an analyst at IHS-Jane’s, a global security consulting firm. “They were designed to alarm and destabilize. And their geographical spread reinforces that.”
Presidential spokesman Ye Htut linked the blasts to Myanmar assuming this year’s chairmanship of ASEAN.
“It must have been carried out to create worries and concern among the people, and to make the international community doubt the security standard in Myanmar at a time when Myanmar is going to take the ASEAN chair,” Ye Htut told Radio Free Asia’s Burmese-language service.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘BODIES EVERYWHERE’: The incident occurred at a Filipino festival celebrating an anti-colonial leader, with the driver described as a ‘lone suspect’ known to police Canadian police arrested a man on Saturday after a car plowed into a street party in the western Canadian city of Vancouver, killing a number of people. Authorities said the incident happened shortly after 8pm in Vancouver’s Sunset on Fraser neighborhood as members of the Filipino community gathered to celebrate Lapu Lapu Day. The festival, which commemorates a Filipino anti-colonial leader from the 16th century, falls this year on the weekend before Canada’s election. A 30-year-old local man was arrested at the scene, Vancouver police wrote on X. The driver was a “lone suspect” known to police, a police spokesperson told journalists at the
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has unveiled a new naval destroyer, claiming it as a significant advancement toward his goal of expanding the operational range and preemptive strike capabilities of his nuclear-armed military, state media said yesterday. North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Kim attended the launching ceremony for the 5,000-tonne warship on Friday at the western port of Nampo. Kim framed the arms buildup as a response to perceived threats from the US and its allies in Asia, who have been expanding joint military exercises amid rising tensions over the North’s nuclear program. He added that the acquisition
RSS