(Yangon) A verdict in the river lawsuit brought by the Burmese junta against Aung San Suu Kyi was postponed on Monday, the latest twist in a long series of legal proceedings that could lead to the ex-leader, already sentenced to two years at the start December, in prison for decades.
The Nobel Prize winner, 76, has been under house arrest since the coup at the start of the year that toppled her. On the morning of 1er February, the military returned to power in the Southeast Asian country, ending a brief democratic parenthesis.
The judgment, in the part of the case where she is accused of having imported and possessed walkie-talkies illegally, was postponed to December 27 “without giving any reason”, we learned from a source close to the case. .
For that, Aung San Suu Kyi risks in theory three years in prison, but this is only one of the many charges which, according to the analysts, aim to remove him definitively from the political arena.
The charges relate to the early hours of the coup, when soldiers and police broke into her home and allegedly found her in possession of unauthorized equipment.
During the investigation, members of the team that led the raid admitted during questioning that they did not have a search warrant, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Earlier this month, she was sentenced to four years in prison for inciting public unrest and violating health regulations related to COVID-19, a verdict strongly condemned by the international community.
Closed trial
Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing later commuted the sentence to two years in prison, and announced that she would serve her sentence under house arrest in the capital, Naypyidaw.
The media are not allowed to attend his trial behind closed doors in a special court in the capital. The junta also banned its legal team from speaking to the press and international organizations.
The junta has regularly added new charges, including corruption, punishable by 15 years in prison, and electoral fraud in elections that his party, the National League for Democracy (LND), won hands down in November 2020.
For almost 10 months, the lady from Rangoon has been confined to an undisclosed location with a small team. Her link with the outside world is limited to brief meetings with her lawyers, which kept her informed of the situation in the country and relayed messages to her supporters.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s defense team was the sole source of information about the closed-door trial.
In the meantime, several trials have sentenced other prominent members of the NLD to severe sentences.
A former minister was sentenced to 75 years in prison in early December, while a close associate of the former head of government received a 20-year sentence.