Yangon: Opponents of the ruling junta in Myanmar on Sunday mourned the killings of at least 114 people by security forces in the bloodiest d...
Yangon: Opponents of the ruling junta in Myanmar on Sunday mourned the killings of at least 114 people by security forces in the bloodiest day since the military coup on February 1.
The online news site Myanmar Now reported late on Saturday that the death toll had reached 114. A count issued by an independent researcher in Yangon who has been compiling near-real time death tolls put the total at 107, spread over more than two dozen cities and towns.
Children were among those killed on
Saturday, Myanmar’s Armed Forces Day, according to news reports and witnesses.
Saturday also brought some of the
heaviest fighting since the coup between the army and the ethnic armed groups
that control swathes of the country.
Military jets had killed at least
three people in a raid on a village controlled by an armed group from the Karen
minority, a civil society group said on Sunday, after the Karen National Union
faction earlier said it had overrun an army post near the Thai border, killing
10 people. The airstrikes sent villagers fleeing into the jungle.
A junta spokesman did not answer
calls seeking comment on the killings or the fighting.
Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the
junta leader, had said during a parade to mark Armed Forces Day that the
military would protect the people and strive for democracy.
The dead included 40 people, one of
them a 13-year-old girl, in Myanmar’s second city of Mandalay. At least 27
people were killed in the commercial hub Yangon, Myanmar Now said. Another
13-year-old was among the dead in the central Sagaing region.
Deaths were recorded from the Kachin
region in the mountainous north to Taninthartharyi in the far south on the
Andaman Sea - taking the overall number of civilians reported killed since the
coup to more than 440.
In the United States, he Secretary of
State Antony Blinken condemning the violence said, “We are horrified by the
bloodshed perpetrated by Burmese security forces, showing that the junta will
sacrifice the lives of the people to serve the few,” he said in a tweet. “I
send my deepest condolences to the victims' families. The courageous people of
Burma reject the military's reign of terror.”
The EU delegation to Myanmar said
Saturday would “forever stay engraved as a day of terror and dishonour.”
UN Special Rapporteur Tom Andrews
said it was time for the world to take action - if not through the UN Security
Council then through an international emergency summit. He said the junta
should be cut off from all funding, such as oil and gas revenues, as well as
access to weapons. (Agencies)
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