Ethnic armed group in Myanmar sentences man to death in public hearing

YANGON (AFP): An ethnic armed group in Myanmar has sentenced a man to death for murder after a public hearing in a town recently captured from the junta.

Officials from the United Wa State Army (UWSA) convicted the man of murdering an eight-year-old girl, Wa News Land said on Wednesday.

The post said the girl was killed during a robbery at a grocery store in the Shan state town of Hopang in August, and authorities arrested the man two months later.

The UWSA is the best-equipped of Myanmar’s dozen or so ethnic armed groups and has close ties to China, which analysts say supplies most of its weapons.

It operates a semi-autonomous region bordering China’s Yunnan province that uses China’s currency and gets its electricity and internet from Chinese providers.

The group took control of Hopang in January after an allied ethnic armed group seized the area from the military and handed it over.

Six others were sentenced to life imprisonment or long prison terms at a public hearing at a “cultural park” in the town, Wa News Land said, without specifying their crimes.

“The death penalty has been given, but we will not execute him in public,” a judicial official told the press.

Many of Myanmar’s ethnic armed groups operate parallel legal systems in the territories they hold along the country’s borders.

In April, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) executed three of its personnel for murder and selling weapons and ammunition stolen from the group.