Brutal execution, dismemberment by Myanmar military exposed in defectors’ video

Content warning: This article contains pictures and detailed descriptions of killings that may be upsetting to some readers. In a small crowd of men armed with guns and knives, who appear onscreen in front of two long buildings near a riverbank, a man sits on the ground blindfolded, with his hands tied behind his back. One of the armed men barks a few questions at the seated, bound man before another in the visibly excited crowd calls out: “Don’t want any gunshots to be heard!” After repeatedly shouting at the seated man, “Are you in the PDF?”—referring to the People’s Defence Forces of the armed resistance against military rule in Myanmar—the interrogator signals to other men waiting nearby. One steps forward with a knife and stabs the seated man in the chest. He screams once before falling silent. Another man in an orange T-shirt brandishing a machete starts to hack at the victim’s ankle. The victim flails wildly, struggling to pull away, but cannot escape. Shouts rise from the surrounding crowd: “One finished, one to go!” “Cut it off! Cut it off!” “Get it on video!” “What kind of bastard is this?” “PDF!” As the shouting continues, the attackers start hacking at their captive’s neck. They continue until the head is completely severed. They then prop the head upright on the supine victim’s torso, and various men in the mob posed for gruesome photos amid raucous cheering. This nightmarish scene took place on an unconfirmed date in late July near Min Kun, a town in Sagaing Township in the central region of the same name. Once a thriving tourist destination known for its abundance of pagodas, monasteries, and other landmarks, the area has been overwhelmed by Myanmar junta troops, and the so-called people’s militias armed and trained by them, as the military tries to recapture ground previously lost to the anti-junta resistance. While the military has always denied all involvement in previous cold-blooded summary executions and dismemberments, the leaked video clip recorded by junta soldiers stands as undeniable evidence of their treatment of opponents and alleged resistance members. Junta soldier Phyu Lay and Lance Corporal Sit Thein celebrating after beheading a villager in Me Za Li Chaung village. After catastrophic quake, Sagaing faces destruction of war The most devastating effects of the earthquake that hit central Myanmar on March 28 of this year were felt in the cities of Sagaing and Mandalay, located on opposite banks of the Ayeyarwady River. While Myanmar’s military regime announced a ceasefire to enable rescue and relief efforts after the quake, bombing raids by the air force continued and infantry maintained operations at and near the earthquake’s epicentre in Sagaing Township. Data compiled by the Sagaing Township People’s Administration Organisation (PAO)—which operates under the publicly mandated, anti-junta National Unity Government (NUG)—indicates that at least 70 civilians were killed and nearly 100 injured by raids and airstrikes in the four months after the earthquake. Locals have also fled their homes in Sagaing Township in massive numbers in response to the combined impacts of the earthquake and the junta’s indiscriminate warfare. Since June, the regime has been escalating offensive operations in the region as part of a countrywide push to retake captured territory from resistance forces ahead of planned elections at the end of the year. Three army columns have been manoeuvring through the township and conducting periodic raids: one seeking to flush out the resistance from villages surrounding the town of Sagaing, one conducting clearance operations on the strategically important Shwebo-Mandalay road, and the third advancing through villages near the Min Kun hills and Ayeyarwady River. According to soldiers who defected from the military, soldiers from the third column were responsible for the brutal execution depicted in the video. The town of Sagaing on May 29, two months after the earthquake that struck central Myanmar earlier this year (Photo: Ko Kan Kaung) How the killing came to light The cold-blooded killing depicted in the video files occurred in the village of Me Za Li Chaung in Sagaing Township—around seven miles north of the famous Min Kun Pahtodawgyi pagoda—according to an officer of the local resistance organisation Daung Soldiers’ Group. Having clashed with resistance forces in the villages of Aint Daing and Chaung U some 15 miles north of Sagaing, an army set up camp in Me Za Li Chaung, a settlement of around 100 households a short distance up the bank of the Ayeyarwady where most residents make a living through fishing or farming. Most of Me Za Li Chaung’s inhabitants had already fled the village before the troops arrived. However, a man in his 30s named Zaw Zaw Myo had stayed behind and fell captive to the soldiers when he went down to bathe in the river on the day of the incident. According to accounts from defecting soldiers, after torturing the young man and interrogating him about his connections to the PDF, the junta troops killed him at around 3pm in a compound near a monastery and school on the south side of the village. The defectors who surrendered to the PDF—conscripts between 18 and 24 years old from Yangon, Mandalay, Bago, and Natogyi Township—had undergone three months of basic military training before the army deployed them to the area where the execution occurred. Along with other new recruits, they had been told that if they deserted and tried to make contact with resistance forces, they would only be interrogated, tortured, and killed. Even so, the young men said, witnessing the brutality and cruelty perpetrated by the army strengthened their determination to escape. Remaining vigilant for an opportunity, they finally fled the army on August 20, taking two firearms with them and surrendering to the Daung Soldiers’ Group. Members of the resistance group learned of the horrific murder of Zaw Zaw Aung from four video files saved on the defectors’ mobile phones. When Myanmar Now contacted the defecting soldiers, they said that contrary to the propaganda they had heard from their superiors in the army, the People’s Defence Forces Myanmar Now was able to contact and interview these four young men. Unlike the junta’s propaganda, they said the defectors were treated well by the PDF and given the same rations as resistance members. Who is responsible? The brutal execution of Zaw Zaw Aung is recorded in four separate video files, with the first showing the interrogation, the beheading, and the celebration by junta troops in sequence, lasting two minutes and 25 seconds in total. Lance Corporal Ka Tha (left, holding a firearm) was shown giving the order to kill a prisoner in the video files saved by defecting junta soldiers The next two video files show the troops disembowelling the body and further dismembering the body from two different camera angles. Having laid the cadaver on a plastic sheet, they use a long-handled hoe to pierce the belly. Having failed to use the hoe as intended, one of the men crouches to make a longer cut from the chest to the navel of the victim’s body. The crowd cheers and shouts in support as the man wearing an orange T-shirt severs the victim’s genitals with a knife. The victim’s remaining leg is also cut at the ankle. A fourth and final clip shows the headless cadaver and severed appendages being thrown into the river. One of the four young defectors said he personally witnessed the dismemberment of the body, but that the other three were on guard duty outside Me Za Li Chaung village at the time and did not see it first-hand. “They hacked it with the hoe,” the 21-year-old recalls, referring to the abdomen of the corpse. “When they used the hoe, it seemed not to be cutting through, so they started using knives. That’s when the intestines came spilling out.” The defectors said they were able to identify several of the people responsible, giving the name and rank of an involved commanding officer and four other participants in the killing. Major Sit Naing was the real ringleader, they said, but he could not be seen in the saved video files. The man seen in the footage holding a gun and giving the order to kill after the interrogation was Lance Corporal Ka Tha, according to the defectors, while the man wearing a checkered long-sleeved shirt and green longyi who used knives to stab and cut the victim was Lance Corporal Sit Thein. Finally, the man wearing the orange T-shirt who hacked wildly at the victim was Private Phyu Lay, they said. An 18-year-old defector noted that the footage showed both voluntarily enlisted men and newer recruits drafted into the unit since the regime revived the 2024 conscription law, and that each cohort could be distinguished from the other by their ID numbers. In conversation with Myanmar Now, he said conscripts were more reluctant to obey the commanding officer’s orders to beat or mistreat civilians than the volunteers. “Major Sit Naing was in command,” he said. “Then, under him, there are his subordinates Lance Corporal Ka Tha, Corporal Sit Kyaw, and [Lance] Corporal Sit Thein. They are volunteers.” “They just had to obey orders,” he continued. “If he said, ‘do this’, they had to do it. The conscripts didn't really want to do it, only the volunteer enlistees did.” The column seen in the footage included troops from the Light Infantry Division (LID) 33 base in Sagaing and the Light Infantry Battalion 111 base in Wuntho Township under its command, as well as new conscripts, and members of so-called “people’s militias” or Pyu Saw Htee, who are sponsored, armed, and trained by the military but are not regular soldiers. Mandalay in October 2021 (Photo: AFP) LID 33’s brutal history LID 33, which operates under the military’s Northwestern Command in Monywa, is made up of eight infantry and light infantry battalions including LIB 111. It is known for its previous participation in the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya people from Rakhine State in 2017, which is now the subject of a genocide case at the International Court of Justice. The United Kingdom imposed sanctions on LIDs 33 and 99 and their leadership in December 2022, citing their involvement in sexual violence against the Rohingya. Captain Zin Yaw, a former army officer who defected after the 2021 military coup, told Myanmar Now that LID 33 has long had a reputation for recklessness and flouting standard procedures. “Units on the ground are not authorised to interrogate captured personnel,” he explained. “At minimum, prisoners must be transferred to the column headquarters, where column and battalion commanders are present.” “Recently in the Ogre Column, even the privates have been acting without restraint,” he added, referring to a notorious unit commanded by LID 33 that committed atrocities against resistance members and civilians in Sagaing Region in 2023. “It appears they are not only allowed to do as they please but are also being encouraged to do so.” The Ogre Column was reportedly involved in the beheading, dismemberment, and evisceration of a resistance leader as well as taking 15 local civilians hostage and using them as human shields before executing them. The columns operating in Sagaing Township now include many new conscripts drafted into the army under the People’s Military Service Law, a decade-old rule that the junta began enforcing again last year to remedy its shortage of manpower. Light Infantry Division 33 soldiers in Mandalay in February 2021 (Photo: Myanmar Now) Atrocities The troops implicated in the Me Za Li Chaung beheading were also allegedly involved in other atrocities, according to the conscripts who defected, such as capturing and shooting displaced civilians who crossed their path. The column captured and executed a 13-year-old, a woman, her husband, the husband’s younger brother, an elderly man, and another woman, the defectors said, and soldiers raped the younger woman before killing her. While they did not witness the killing first-hand, they said they heard at least ten gunshots when the soldiers took the captives to the edge of the forest one night after holding them at the base camp. Sayar Kyaung, a member of the Peacock Warriors local resistance group, said several civilians met this fate after taking the risk of returning to their home village to find food, having been displaced from their homes by the threat of airstrikes and approaching infantry troops. Resistance members found the decomposing bodies of two men and three women near the woods in the third week of August, according to Sayar Kyaung. He could not confirm whether the bodies belonged to the same civilians the defectors were referring to. The column’s soldiers went on to detain at least ten more civilians, including elderly people and women whom they forced to cook for them. A member of the Sagaing Township PAO confirmed that junta troops in the township had taken close to 20 local people captive in the past two months in the Min Kun area, and that their families had not heard from them since their capture. “It is heartbreaking for us to simply sit and watch when a civilian is captured. We can’t help or rescue them. We would only be able to intervene if our strength matched that of the enemy,” said Sayar Kyaung. He believes the junta forces’ goal in treating civilians so brutally is to instil fear and sow division between civilians and the resistance, but they have failed so far. Lat Yar, leader of the NUG-commanded Shwebo District Special Operations Battalion 9706, said the resistance was not giving up despite the increasingly dire state of the conflict. “The revolution will not be stopped by the torture of civilians or resistance soldiers, and our comrades will not give up out of fear,” he said. “It will only deepen our anger and strengthen our resolve.”

Brutal execution, dismemberment by Myanmar military exposed in defectors’ video

In footage saved by conscripts who defected from the army, junta soldiers in Sagaing Township can be seen dismembering and beheading a man accused of being a resistance member before further desecrating his corpse

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