Htet Khaung Linn

Police pressured Reuters journalists to bury report on Inn Din massacre, says Wa Lone

YANGON — Jailed Reuters journalist Ko Wa Lone told a Yangon court on July 17 that during a police interrogation, which included sleep deprivation, police officers tried to induce him and his colleague Ko Kyaw Soe Oo not to publish an investigation into a military-led massacre of 10 Muslims in Inn Din village of northern Rakhine State. The 32-year-old journalist was describing their time at the Aung Thabyay police interrogation centre in Yangon’s northern Mayangone Township in December, after he and Kyaw Soe Oo were arrested in what strongly resembles a police set-up. This was the journalists’ first time testifying in the Yangon Northern District Court, though they have been detained in Yangon’s Insein Prison since their arrest. They have undergone six months of pre-trial hearings, where prosecution witnesses were presented and cross-examined. If sentenced, they face 14 years in prison. On July 9, the judge accepted the charges against them under the Official Secrets Act for allegedly holding classified government documents relating to security deployments in northern Rakhine State, where the Myanmar military has displaced close to 700,000 Rohingya Muslims into neighbouring Bangladesh in a crackdown on Rohingya militants. Wa Lone testified that police interrogators told them that if…