Death Sentences Handed Out For Revealing Myanmar and North Korean Secrets

 

Two Myanmar officials have been sentenced to death for leaking confidential information including secret trips by junta leaders to North Korea and Russia and for also giving details and photographs (possibly those above lifted from Joshua’s site) of Myanmar tunnels built by North Korea.  Here are some very interesting articles and videos by Democratic Voice of Burma  of the tunnels being constructed (as many as 800) - part one,  part two, and part three.  The convicted were:

Retired Major Win Naing Kyaw  who had worked as a personal assistant for late junta secretary-2, General Tin Oo, who died in a helicopter crash in 2001 (note that Wikipedia says that General Tin Oo is still in prison  but there are other sites that give accounts of his crash) After retiring from the army, he joined a non-governmental organisation under the UN Development Programme in Burma, and went for training in Cambodia. He was arrested on his return at Rangoon International Airport on 29 July this year.  He was sentenced to death plus given a 15 years’ prison sentence for violation of the Electronics Acts, 3 years’ imprisonment for illgeal possession of foreign exchange and two years’ imprisonment for unauthorized possession of official secrets.

Thura Kyaw a.k.a. Aung Aung Ko, an upper division clerk for the Foreign Ministry, Europe Affairs Department who was convicted of leaking documents related to a 2006 visit by the SPDC’s second-in command, Maung Aye, to Russia, where he discussed the procurement of a guided missile system with Moscow’s deputy minister of defense, Yury Nikolayevich Baluyevsky.  He was sentenced to death plus 15 years imprisonment for violation of the Electonics act.

Go Byan Sein a.k.a. Ah See was convicted of spreading information about Burma’s tunnel project close to Naypyidaw via a woman known only as Ma Sint.  He was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment for violation of the Electonics act.

There may be more army officials convicted including special warrant officer Aung Kyaw Linn from the Myanmar Army (ground force) and is currently detained in a military prison under a direct order from the military court.

According to Mizzima, the two officials are planning on appealing their sentences.  The same source noted that over 200 such death sentences have been awarded since 1989-90 when the present military regime assumed power but it is unclear how many of those sentence were actually carried out.   According to the AFP, these sentences are almost always communted to life imprisonment.  Wikipedia seems to support this conviction in regards to the number of executions carried out in Burma in the past ten years – zero.