A pregnant woman who was raped repeatedly before her death was one of four people murdered by regime forces in Sagaing Region’s Wetlet Township last Friday, according to local sources.
The victims and two others—the pregnant woman’s mother and her sister-in-law—were abducted by a column of around 100 junta soldiers near the village of Kyeekan earlier the same day, the sources said.
All six were taken to a tea shop in the village, where 20-year-old Shwe Mann Thu was gang-raped before being taken away to a mango grove with three others to be killed, a member a local defence team told Myanmar Now, citing the survivors.
“They [Shwe Mann Thu’s mother and sister-in-law] said they could hear her cries. An officer was also going to rape the sister-in-law, but she bowed down and pleaded with him to spare her because she was the mother of two children,” he said.
One of the murdered victims was Shwe Mann Thu’s 55-year-old father, Tin San, who is believed to have witnessed his daughter’s rape before they were both killed.
“There were bruises on his hands, probably from struggling. We think the soldiers raped her in front of him,” said the defence team member.
A villager who saw the bodies of the victims after they were discovered the next day said it appeared that the brutal sexual assault on Shwe Mann Thu continued at the site of her murder.
“When we found the bodies, we saw that there was a bottle of Royal-D drink inserted into her vagina, and there were no clothes on the lower part of her body,” said the villager, who added that Shwe Mann Thu was three months pregnant.
All four of the victims had their throats cut, while Shwe Mann Thu and Tin San also had multiple stab wounds and bruises from apparent beatings, according to the villager.
The bodies were about four or five feet apart, suggesting that they were killed at around the same time, he added.
The other two victims were identified as Han Shwe, a resident of North Kyeekan, and Naing Lin, who lived in South Kyeekan.
Kyeekan is located about 10km west of the town of Wetlet on the Shwebo-Myitkyina road. The junta column responsible for the killings was travelling north on the road from a military base in the village of Ywar Thar Gyi to another in Hla Taw, a village about 4km from Kyeekan, at the time of the incident.
The battalion that the column belonged to and the name of its commanding officer could not be determined at the time of reporting.
According to a member of the Shwebo District People’s Defence Force, the column has come under repeated attack from resistance forces since it entered Wetlet Township from the south on August 24, resulting in the loss of at least four of its troops.
Days before it arrived in Wetlet Township, the column also killed two civilians and five local defence team members in neighbouring Sagaing Township.
On August 11, junta troops killed two civilians and two resistance fighters in the villages of Khet Kha and Ta Laing, which are both located on the border between the two townships.
In early July, regime forces killed seven people in three separate incidents in a single day in and around the village of Thamayoe in Wetlet Township. Three of the victims were middle-aged women on their way to a nearby market.
According to an officer of the Wetlet Township People’s Defence Team, the junta column left Kyeekan on August 26, but residents of the village have yet to return to their homes.
