Three women from Yangon were shot and killed at the foot of Kyaiktiyo Hill in Mon State after a clash broke out nearby between the Myanmar army and resistance forces on Wednesday morning.
The victims were identified as Than Than Thwe, Aye Aye Kyu and Kyawt Kay Khine from Yangon’s Thingangyun Township. They were among the religious pilgrims who had travelled to Kyaiktiyo Hill—where a pagoda sits atop a large boulder known as the Golden Rock—to mark the end of Buddhist Lent.
Nine women and eight men, including a junta police officer, were also reportedly injured in the shooting and sent to the Kyaikhto Township hospital for treatment.
Locals told Myanmar Now that the shots in question were fired outside a bus terminal in Kin Mun Chaung village as the pilgrims were passing the site, but further details surrounding the clash were not known.
“I don’t know how the shooting started,” a member of a social welfare group operating out of Kin Mun Chaung told Myanmar Now.
The area in question falls within the Karen National Union’s (KNU) Brigade 1 territory in Thaton District, but a KNU representative for the area was unable to provide comment on the incident when contacted by Myanmar Now on Wednesday.
A spokesperson from the Thaton chapter of the anti-junta People’s Defence Force (PDF) told BBC Burmese on Thursday that his group had attacked a military checkpoint in Kin Mun Chaung at which the occupying troops had been known to extort money from passersby.
However, he said that the pilgrims at Kyaiktiyo were killed when the junta’s forces arbitrarily opened fire on the area after the clash.
In junta-controlled media, the military accused the KNU’s armed wing, the Karen National Liberation Army, and the PDF of killing the civilians, and listed the number of people wounded as 19.
