Day: October 1, 2010

Mon monk sentenced to 15 years in Insein Prison

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Ashin Uk Kong Sah

Arka : Mon monk Ashin Uk Kong Sah, arrested on January 7th of this year, received a sentence of 15 years in Insein Prison, from the Insein Prison court in Rangoon.

According to his attorney, Ashin Uk Kong Sah was sentenced on Monday to 10 years in prison for violating “Electricity Act”, 4 years for Publication Act and 1 year for disturbing the security and peace of the state.

The broken “Electricity Act” referes to the cache of computers, printers, and hard drives that the defendant had stored in his residence at the time of his arrest.

Daw Khin Htay Kywe, Ashin’s attorney, reported that technically, the court was entitled to mete out a longer sentence comprised of 15 years for Electricity Act, 7 years for Publication Act, and 2 years for disturbing the security and peace of the state, but the original 24 year-long sentence was reduced to a 15 year period.

Despite the sentence reductions, Daw Khin Htay Kywe told IMNA that he was displeased with the results of the trial, as he maintains that his client was convicted without valid legal evidence.

“The [plaintiffs] couldn’t confirm their proof of his case, according to the law” Daw Khin Htay Kywe said. Continue reading “Mon monk sentenced to 15 years in Insein Prison” →

U Kengmai, 50, chief of 200-strong Mongpaw militia unit, was said to have told villagers in its controlled areas to vote for the USDP or their lives would be in danger.

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FRIDAY, 01 OCTOBER 2010 16:14 HSENG KHIO FAH

Local residents in Shan State North’s Muse Township, located opposite China’s Yunnan province, are saying that they are under pressure and threats by local authorities to cast votes for junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) due to its ‘must win’ policy.

The USDP is using local militia groups to push people to vote for the party saying people who cast vote for other parties would be imprisoned, a local resident told SHAN.

On 27 September, U Kengmai, 50, chief of 200-strong Mongpaw militia unit, was said to have told villagers in its controlled areas to vote for the USDP or their lives would be in danger.

“If we win, we win. And if we don’t win, we must still win,” a villager in Mongkoe quoted him as saying.

U Kengmai is mostly well-known among the local people as a drug lord. Most drug production in Muse and Kutkhai Townships are reportedly run by him and another drug lord U Myint Lwin. And most products to China were transported through his controlled areas, according to businessmen.

He will contest for state legislature in Muse, Constituency No.2 as a representative of USDP. Continue reading “U Kengmai, 50, chief of 200-strong Mongpaw militia unit, was said to have told villagers in its controlled areas to vote for the USDP or their lives would be in danger.” →

Bomb blast hits Bago election office

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A local authority office in eastern Burma’s Bago division being used by Election Commission officials was the target of a bombing on Wednesday night.

No casualties were reported following the incident at the Ward Peace and Development Council (WPDC) office in Bago township’s Okthar Myothit 8 ward. Locals said that a wall of the office was blown open by the explosion, which occurred around 9pm on 29 September.

Reuters reported that Election Commission officials were using the office to coordinate the local ballot for the 7 November elections, but had closed the office 45 minutes before the bombing. Some local sources told DVB that the explosion happened outside of the office.

The state-run New Light of Myanmar newspaper reported today that the bombing was the work of “insurgents, destructive elements and political opportunists” attempting to derail the polls, Burma’s first in 20 years.

It added that a the device was a “hand-made TNT time bomb which had exploded just outside the back fence of the office”.

Police and local authorities in Bago were unavailable for comment.

http://www.dvb.no/elections/bomb-blast-hits-bago-election-office/12047?

မြန္ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေကာင္စီတပ္ဖြဲ႔ဝင္တစ္ဦး အပစ္ခတ္ခံရ by Kaowao

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MNPCP မြန္ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးကာကြယ္ေရးတပ္ဖြဲ႔မွ စီးပြားေရးတာဝန္ခံ ႏုိင္မန္း (ေခၚ) အမန္း ေသနတ္ပစ္ခတ္ခံထိသျဖင့္ ေမာ္လၿမဳိင္ေဆး႐ုံႀကီး၌ အတြင္းလူနာအျဖစ္ ကုသခံေနရသည္ဟု ၄င္းအသိမိတ္ေဆြတစ္ဦးက ဖုန္းျဖင့္အသိေပး ေျပာၾကားပါသည္။

“ဗုိက္မွာႏွစ္ခ်က္ထိတယ္၊ ျဖစ္ျဖစ္ခ်င္းေဆး႐ုံကုိအျမန္တင္လုိက္တယ္၊ ေသသလား႐ွင္သလား မသိရေသးဘူး၊ ေလာေလာဆယ္ သူ႔မိသားစုနဲ႔ အဆက္အသြယ္ျပတ္ေတာက္ေနၾကလုိ႔” ဟု ၄င္းကေျပာပါသည္။

ေနာက္ဆုံးအေျခအေနသိ႐ွိႏုိင္ရန္ ေမာ္လၿမဳိင္ေဆး႐ုံႀကီးသုိ႔ ဖုန္းျဖင့္အႀကိမ္ႀကိမ္ ဆက္သြယ္ေမးျမန္း ခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း မေအာင္ျမင့္ခဲ့ေပ။ Continue reading “မြန္ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေကာင္စီတပ္ဖြဲ႔ဝင္တစ္ဦး အပစ္ခတ္ခံရ by Kaowao” →