Lagatar24 Desk
New Delhi, Nov 17: In a rare gesture of goodwill from the outlawed junta, Myanmar’s military announced on Thursday that it will free over 6,000 detainees, including a former British ambassador, a Japanese journalist, and an Australian economics consultant.
Since the military’s takeover last year and a deadly crackdown on opposition that resulted in thousands of people being imprisoned, the nation of Southeast Asia has been in upheaval.
The crackdown has affected dozens of foreign nationals.
Vicky Bowman, a former British diplomat, Sean Turnell, an economist from Australia, and Toru Kubota, a journalist from Japan, “will be released to honour National Day,” a senior official told AFP.
“Altogether, 5,774 prisoners including some 600 women prisoners will be released,” they said, revising an earlier figure of about 700.
They omitted to mention the number of people pardoned who had been detained as part of the military’s campaign against dissent.
Bowman, who was ambassador from 2002 to 2006, was taken into custody in August along with her husband for failing to disclose that she was residing at a different home than that which was given on her foreigner registration card. They later served a year in prison. The official announced that her famous artist husband Htein Lin would also be released.
When Sean Turnell was arrested soon after the coup in February of last year, he was serving as an advisor to Suu Kyi, the civilian leader of Myanmar. He and Suu Kyi were sentenced to three years in prison each in September after being found guilty of violating the official secrets act by a secret junta court.
Along with two other citizens of Myanmar, Kubota, 26, was arrested in July near an anti-government demonstration in Yangon and sentenced to ten years in prison.
Following American citizens Nathan Maung and Danny Fenster, Pole Robert Bociaga, and Japanese journalist Yuki Kitazumi, all of whom were later released and deported, Kubota is the sixth foreign journalist to be held in Myanmar. According to the monitoring organisation Reporting ASEAN, 48 journalists were still being held in detention across the nation as of March.
