A court in Myanmar yesterday postponed its verdict in the trial of ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi to allow testimony from an additional witness, a senior member of her political party.
The court agreed with a defense motion that it allow Zaw Myint Maung, who had previously been unable to come to court for health reasons, to add his testimony, a legal official said.
The court had been scheduled to deliver a verdict yesterday on charges of incitement and breaching COVID-19 restrictions.
Photo: AP
The verdict would have been the first for the 76-year-old Nobel laureate since the army seized power on Feb. 1, arresting her and blocking her National League for Democracy party from starting a second term in office.
She is also being tried on a series of other charges, including corruption, that could send her to prison for dozens of years if convicted.
The judge adjourned the proceedings until Monday next week, when Zaw Myint Maung is scheduled to testify, said the legal official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, because the government has restricted the release of information about the trial. It was unclear when a verdict is to be issued.
The cases are widely seen as contrived to discredit Aung San Suu Kyi and keep her from running in the next election. The constitution bars anyone sentenced to prison from holding high office or becoming a lawmaker.
Zaw Myint Maung, who was chief minister of the Mandalay region, a major state-level post, was also detained when the army took over. He is vice chairman of Aung San Suu Kyi’s party and a medical doctor, and, like her, faces several criminal charges, including corruption. He is 69 years old and reportedly suffers from leukemia.
He accompanied Aung San Suu Kyi during campaigning for last year’s election, including in Naypyidaw, where her presence was the basis for one of the charges of breaching COVID-19 restrictions.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won a landslide victory in last year’s polls. The army, whose allied party lost many seats, claimed there was massive voting fraud, but independent election observers did not detect any major irregularities.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees