Myanmar court accepts whistleblower officer’s testimony

Deputy police Captain Moe Yan Naing (C) leaves the court following the ongoing trial of two detained journalists in Yangon, Myanmar, on April 20, 2018. (Photo by AFP)

A court in Myanmar has accepted the testimony of a police captain who has testified that his senior officer aimed to “trap” two Reuters journalists covering state-sponsored violence against minority Rohingya Muslims in the Buddhist-majority country.

Reuters reporters Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, were taken into custody on December 12, 2017 on the outskirts of Myanmar’s largest city of Yangon shortly after they had dinner with two police officers, who gave them documents related to the violence.

Police Captain Moe Yan Naing was arrested on the same day the two journalists were detained, after being identified as one of two policemen involved in the case.

Authorities ordered his wife and three children to move out of a police housing complex after he gave the testimony at court, in what seemed to be an act of personal reprisal against the police captain.

On Monday, Moe was jailed for breaching a police disciplinary act — a charge he had allegedly faced before delivering the testimony.

Moe testified last month that the two journalists had been set up by senior police officials, who wanted them incriminated over their coverage of the massacre of Rohingyas in Myanmar’s Rakhine State.

Prosecutors said the police captain had recounted a different story to investigators at the time of his arrest, calling on the court to declare him an unreliable witness. They also claimed that Moe held a grudge against the police authorities because he was facing charges.

However, the court in Yangon on Wednesday denied a request by prosecutors to declare Moe a “hostile witness” in the case against the two reporters, arguing that the police captain’s testimony did not contradict his earlier account.

Judge Ye Lwin said Moe was a member of the police force so “it is not suitable to consider him as an unreliable witness.”

Than Zaw Aung, a lawyer representing the two Reuters journalists, welcomed the Wednesday ruling. He said Moe would remain a witness in the case and the court would hear further testimony from him next week.

The journalists themselves had said in a news conference late last year that police had framed them by giving them “two rolled papers” at a restaurant and immediately arresting them afterwards. The papers turned out to be top-secret government documents.

The journalists had been working on the massacre of 10 Rohingya men by government soldiers in Inn Dinn Village in western Myanmar on September 2, 2017.

Detained Reuters journalists Wa Lone (2nd-R) and Kyaw Soe Oo (L) are being escorted by police after a court hearing in Yangon, Myanmar, on February 1, 2018. (Photo by Reuters)

The Inn Dinn Village massacre was only one instance of the violence taking place on a massive scale against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar’s Rakhine since late 2016.

The military has blockaded the state since then. In the absence of the media, thousands of Muslims were killed, wounded, or raped, and their houses and villages were torched, according to witness accounts by the hundreds of thousands who have managed to flee to neighboring Bangladesh.

Those accounts have been verified by the international medics who have examined the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, confirming that their bodily injuries correspond to their accounts of violence back in Myanmar, including rape.

Myanmar has blatantly denied the widespread accounts of violence against the persecuted Rohingya Muslim community in Rakhine.