Myanmar junta executes democracy activists amid international outcry
Myanmar ruling junta has carried out its first executions in nearly 50 years with the hangings of a former National League for Democracy lawmaker, a democracy activist and two men accused of violence after the country's military takeover last year.
The executions announced Monday were carried out despite worldwide pleas for clemency for the four political detainees.
The Mirror Daily state newspaper said the four planned, directed and organized "the violent and inhuman accomplice acts of terrorist killings.”
The paper said they were hanged according to prison procedures but did not say when the executions occurred.
Phyo Zeya Thaw was a 41-year-old former lawmaker from ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, and had been a hip-hop musician before becoming a member of the Generation Wave political movement formed in 2007.
Kyaw Min Yu was a 53-year-old democracy activist and one of the leaders of the 88 Generation Students Group, veterans of a failed 1988 popular uprising against military rule. He already had spent more than a dozen years behind bars for political activism before his arrest in Yangon last October.
The other two men, Hla Myo Aung and Aung Thura Zaw, were convicted of torturing and killing a woman in March 2021 whom they believed was a military informer.
Western governments, rights groups and United Nations experts strongly criticised the decision to hang the men.
“The illegitimate military junta is providing the international community with further evidence of its disregard for human rights as it prepares to hang pro-democracy activists,” two UN experts, Thomas Andrews, special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, and Morris Tidball-Binz, special rapporteur on extrajudicial summary or arbitrary executions, said
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