Junta soldiers accused of rape, summary execution in northern Shan State village

Regime troops in northern Shan State’s Kyaukme Township shot and killed a monk and three other civilians earlier this week, according to local sources, who also said one of the victims had been raped. Township residents found the bodies of a mother and her two children on Thursday, as well as a monk in his 30s, near the village of Nar Aik Hkant some nine miles southwest of Kyaukme, the northern Shan State-based independent monitoring organisation Tai Student Union said, citing first-hand accounts. “A 48-year-old woman and her two children were shot dead by junta soldiers. The boy was just 12 years old. His 16-year-old sister was raped before being killed,” a member of the Tai Student Union said. “The girl’s body was found unclothed below the waist,” the Tai Student Union member added. “There were visible signs of a struggle, and a military uniform was also found at the scene.” Eyewitnesses saw the soldiers finding the mother and her children in a makeshift hut where they were sheltering at the edge of the village. The children’s father was not present at the time and his family had evidently been awaiting his return, according to the organisation. Large numbers of junta forces have been active in the township during an ongoing counteroffensive campaign to recapture territory in northern Shan State from the Ta’ang National Liberation Army—also commonly called the Ta’ang army—an anti-junta armed organisation that held control of Kyaukme and other northern Shan State towns for more than a year. Nar Aik Hkant is some two miles south of the village of Sa Khan Thar, where clashes recently broke out between junta troops and the Ta’ang army. Although most of the village’s residents fled in anticipation that nearby fighting would spread to their homes, some took shelter on farmland just outside the village, possibly to protect their property from looters. “First they shot and killed a monk in his 30s who had stayed behind to take care of an elderly monk who had suffered a stroke,” the Tai Student Union representative said. “They then followed a villager whom they had promised to spare, using him to root out shelters where other villagers were hiding.” Sources in the village said the bodies were cremated after the junta troops withdrew on Thursday, giving the villagers an opportunity to return to the area. Three days before the summary killings outside Nar Aik Hkant, junta shelling killed one man and injured two people in the village of Pin Paw some seven miles to the south. Many more civilian casualties have occurred this month as the military conducted a series of airstrikes on TNLA-controlled territory, with most of the bombing concentrated in northern Shan State’s Kyaukme and Hsipaw townships. According to the monitoring group Shan Human Rights Foundation, some 29 people have been killed since August by junta bombing and shelling in Kyaukme Township. Some 9,000 people displaced from their homes in southern Kyaukme Township are now facing food insecurity, according to local social welfare volunteers. “Some villagers remain trapped or in hiding, and we don’t have the ability to rescue them one by one amid the ongoing clashes,” a volunteer said.

Junta soldiers accused of rape, summary execution in northern Shan State village

According to accounts from villagers who found the bodies, soldiers fatally shot a monk who had remained behind in a mostly evacuated village before killing a mother and her two children, whom they found sheltering on the village’s outskirts

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