Former underground activist and Karen National Union (KNU) leader Mahn Nyein Maung was sentenced to life imprisonment plus three years by a special court in Insein Prison in Rangoon.

“Mahn Nyein Maung got a life sentence after being found guilty of participating in acts of war against the country and the ruling government, and an additional three years for having connections to an illegal organization. The sentences are to be served consecutively,” said his lawyer Kyee Myint.

“It seems to me that he has been mentally affected by all this,” his lawyer said. “He should see a psychologist and needs medical attention.”

David Takapaw, the vice-president of the KNU, urged the government to release the Karen veteran. He said such a move would help create trust between the two parties [the KNU and the Burmese government], and could play a part in affecting the process of peace and national reconciliation.

“The government promised they would release Mahn Nyein Maung to create trust,” he said. “If not, it will be impossible to reconcile.

“We will wait and see whether they release him in a presidential amnesty,” said Takapaw.

He added that, in the meantime, the KNU would file an appeal against the court decision.

According to the KNU vice-president, a promise was made by government negotiator and Railways Minister Aung Min that Mahn Nyein Maung would be released after sentencing through a presidential amnesty.

During ceasefire discussions in the second week of January, Aung Min said President Thein Sein would make this gesture as a sign of goodwill and a step toward making a peace deal with the Karen rebels, said Takapaw.

Mahn Nyein Maung is a prominent KNU leader and a central committee member of the United Nationalities Federal Council ethnic armed alliance.

He was arrested in July 2011 by Chinese immigration officials in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, after being denied entry to Thailand where he was living in exile. He was then deported from China to Burma where he was taken into custody.

He was originally sentenced to one year imprisonment for breaking immigration laws and possessing a fake passport—later reduced to six months when the prison term had already been served.

Mahn Nyein Maung is a former underground activist who conducted operations on behalf of the KNU inside Burma. In 1960, he was arrested and was sent to the Coco Islands, an infamous detention center for political prisoners located some 300 km off the Burmese mainland in the Indian Ocean.

Mahn Nyein Maung and two other political prisoners, Mahn Aung Kyi and Aung Ngwe, managed to escape from the island in 1970 by floating across the water clutching driftwood. However, they were rearrested when they reached the Burmese mainland. It is the only known escape from the prison, located on what is commonly referred to as “Burma’s Devil’s Island.”

Due to his extraordinary escape, Mahn Nyein Maung is frequently likened to the famous French prisoner Henri Charrière, nicknamed “Papillon” [butterfly], who escaped a penal colony in French Guyana. Like Charrière, Mahn Nyein Maung wrote a book about his experiences inside prison and his subsequent escape Irrawaddy news

UPDATE MARCH 13.03.2012

“Mahn Nyein Maung got a life sentence after being found guilty of participating in acts of war against the country and the ruling government, and an additional three years for having connections to an illegal organization. The sentences are to be served consecutively,” said his lawyer Kyee Myint.

“It seems to me that he has been mentally affected by all this,” his lawyer said. “He should see a psychologist and needs medical attention.”

David Takapaw, the vice-president of the KNU, urged the government to release the Karen veteran. He said such a move would help create trust between the two parties [the KNU and the Burmese government], and could play a part in affecting the process of peace and national reconciliation.

“The government promised they would release Mahn Nyein Maung to create trust,” he said. “If not, it will be impossible to reconcile.

“We will wait and see whether they release him in a presidential amnesty,” said Takapaw.

He added that, in the meantime, the KNU would file an appeal against the court decision.

According to the KNU vice-president, a promise was made by government negotiator and Railways Minister Aung Min that Mahn Nyein Maung would be released after sentencing through a presidential amnesty.

During ceasefire discussions in the second week of January, Aung Min said President Thein Sein would make this gesture as a sign of goodwill and a step toward making a peace deal with the Karen rebels, said Takapaw.

Mahn Nyein Maung is a prominent KNU leader and a central committee member of the United Nationalities Federal Council ethnic armed alliance.

He was arrested in July 2011 by Chinese immigration officials in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, after being denied entry to Thailand where he was living in exile. He was then deported from China to Burma where he was taken into custody.

He was originally sentenced to one year imprisonment for breaking immigration laws and possessing a fake passport—later reduced to six months when the prison term had already been served.

Five months after being deported from China, Karen rebel leader Mahn Nyein Maung has been sentenced to 17 years imprisonment, according to a source following the case in Rangoon.

A controversial character, Mahn Nyein Maung is often likened to French convict “Papillon” because of his extraordinary escape from prison on Coco Island in 1970 when he floated across the Indian Ocean clutching driftwood.

He went on trial on Dec. 8 behind closed doors at Mingaladon Court in Rangoon and was later sentenced after being charged with having connections to the Karen National Union (KNU), long denounced by the Burmese government as an illegal militia.

Mahn Nyein Maung, a leading member of the KNU and a central committee member of the ethnic armed alliance, the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC), disappeared at China’s Kunming Airport in late July.

He was subsequently charged in Burma for violating immigration laws and possessing a fake passport. He was sentenced to one year for the immigration charge on Sept. 27, according to Rangoon-based Flower News Journal.

Then, in early December, he was put on trial on the more grievous charges. His case was not publicized and next to no information has been divulged either by the authorities or the KNU about Mahn Nyein Maung’s case or his condition.

An inside source told The Irrawaddy that the Karen rebel leader visited the ethnic Wa region via China on the Sino-Burma border in July. He was subsequently denied reentry into Thailand—where he was living at the time—as he had not applied for a reentry visa when he left from Thailand to China.

Despite his role within the KNU and UNFC, his trip to China and the Wa region had nothing to do with those organization, said the sources. KNU leaders also said that they didn’t know about Mahn Nyein Maung trip to China.

A former activist and political prisoner, Mahn Nyein Maung apparently visited northern Burma to observe first-hand the armed conflict between ethnic armed groups and government troops near the border.

Karen sources have said that after he was denied entry into Thailand, he was sent back to China’s Yunnan province where he was detained at the Kunming Airport. Yunnanese authorities reportedly insisted that Mahn Nyein Maung buy an air ticket with his own money for his deportation to Rangoon.

Mahn Nyein Maung was first arrested in 1960 for his work as an underground dissident. He was sentenced and sent to Coco Island, an infamous detention center for political prisoners located about 300 km off the Burmese mainland. He and two other political prisoners, Mahn Aung Kyi and Aung Ngwe, managed to escape from the island in 1970 by floating across the Indian Ocean clutching driftwood.

Due to his extraordinary escape from Coco Island, Mahn Nyein Maung is frequently likened to the famous French prisoner Henri Charrière, nicknamed “Papillon,” who escaped a penal colony in French Guyana. Like Charrière, Mahn Nyein Maung wrote and published a book about his experiences inside the brutal prison at Coco Island and his daring escape.

 

ဖဒိုမန္းၿငိမ္းေမာင္ ကို မဂၤလာဒုံမွာ ရုံးထုတ္စစ္ေဆး
ပန္းသတင္းဂ်ာနယ္
ဒီဇင္ဘာ ၁၂၊ ၂ဝ၁၁

ကုိးကား – 
http://www.thithtoolwin.com/2011/12/blog-post_5594.html

KNU တပ္မဟာတြင္ တာဝန္ထမ္းေဆာင္ခဲ့သူ အမ်ိဳးသားတစ္ဦး တရုတ္ျပည္မွ ရန္ကုန္ေလဆိပ္သုိ႔ လက္မွတ္အတုျဖင့္ ဝင္ေရာက္လာသျဖင့္ မတရားအသင္းအက္ဥပေဒျဖင့္ မဂၤလာဒုံတရားရုံးက ဒီဇင္ဘာ ၈ ရက္တြင္ စစ္ေဆးေနေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

သိုက္ထြန္း (ခ) ဖဒိုမန္းၿငိမ္းေမာင္ ဆိုသူသည္ သားထူးေဇာ္ အမည္ျဖင့္ ႏိုင္ငံကူးလက္မွတ္ M-073525 ကိုင္ေဆာင္၍ တရုတ္ျပည္ ကူမင္းေလဆိပ္မွ ရန္ကုန္ေလဆိပ္သုိ႔ လြန္ခဲ့သည့္ လပိုင္းအတြင္း လာေရာက္ခဲ့ရာ ေလဆိပ္ရဲစခန္းမွ တာဝန္ရွိသူမ်ားက ၎ ကိုင္ေဆာင္ထားေသာ ႏိုင္ငံကူးလက္မွတ္ေပၚတြင္ ေလဆိပ္လဝကအတြက္ တံဆိပ္တုံး အတုရိုက္ႏွိပ္ထားသည္ကို စစ္ေဆးေတြ႕ရွိရ၍ ေလဆိပ္ရဲစခန္းက (ပ) ၈၀/၁၁၊ ပုဒ္မ ၄၂၀/၄၆၈/၄၇၁ ႏွင့္ လဝက အက္ဥပေဒ (ပ) ၉/၁၁ ၁၉၄၇ ခုႏွစ္ လဝကအက္ဥပေဒပုဒ္မ ၆၁၃ (၁) ၁၇ (၇) (က) (ဃ) တုိ႔ျဖင့္ အမႈဖြင့္အေရးယူၿပီး မဂၤလာဒုံတရားရုံးသုိ႔တင္ပို႔ရာ တရားရုံးက သိုက္ထြန္းအား အျပစ္ရွိေၾကာင္း စစ္ေဆးသိရွိရ၍ စက္တင္ဘာ ၂၇ ရက္က မဂၤလာဒုံတရားရုံးက ပုဒ္မ ၄၆၈ ျဖင့္ ေထာင္ဒဏ္ေျခာက္လ လူဝင္မႈအက္ဥပေဒပုဒ္မ ၁၃(၁) အရ ေထာင္ဒဏ္ေျခာက္လ စုစုေပါင္းတစ္ႏွစ္ခ်မွတ္ခဲ့သည္။

“ေလဆိပ္ရဲစခန္းက တာဝန္ရွိသူေတြအေနနဲ႔ ျပည္ပအဝင္အထြက္ေတြ စနစ္တက် ေသခ်ာစစ္ေဆးတယ္။ မသကၤာတဲ့သူ၊ ျပစ္မႈက်ဴးလြန္တဲ့သူလုိ႔ ယူဆရင္ သီးျခားအခန္းမွာ အဲဒီသူရဲ႕ ပစၥည္းေတြကို တစ္ခုခ်င္းစနစ္တက်စစ္ေဆးေနပါတယ္။ လုံၿခဳံေရးကို တင္းတင္းၾကပ္ၾကပ္ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနပါတယ္” ဟု ေလဆိပ္ရဲစခန္းမွ တာဝန္ရွိသူတစ္ဦးက ေျပာသည္။

သိုက္ထြန္းဆုိသူကို ထပ္မံစစ္ေဆးခ်က္မ်ားအရ ၎သည္ တရားမဝင္အသင္းအျဖစ္ ေၾကညာထားေသာ ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသားအစည္းအရုံး၊ KNU ဗဟိုေကာ္မတီဝင္၊ ေနာင္လြမ္းရာ၊ အုန္းပန္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံမွျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရွိရသည့္ အျပင္ ၎သည္ KNU တပ္မဟာ ၆ တြင္လည္းေကာင္း၊ KNU အထူးတပ္ရန္း ၁၀၁ ဝမ္ခဂိတ္တြင္ KNU အဖြဲ႕ဝင္ျဖစ္ၿပီး KNU ဗဟို ညီလာခံ ဗဟိုေကာ္မတီအျဖစ္ ၎တာဝန္ထမ္းေဆာင္ခဲ့ေၾကာင္း စုံစမ္းသိရွိရသျဖင့္ ျပည္ထဲေရးဝန္ႀကီးဌာန၏ (၃-၁၁-၁၈၈၉) ပါ အမိန္႔ေၾကညာစာ အမွတ္ (၃/၈၉) ျဖင့္ တရားမဝင္အသင္းအျဖစ္ ေၾကညာထားေသာ KNU တြင္ တာဝန္ထမ္းေဆာင္ခဲ့သည့္ အတြက္ သတင္းအဖြဲ႕မွ တရားလုိျပဳလုပ္ကာ တိုင္တန္းသျဖင့္ မဂၤလာဒုံရဲစခန္းမွ (ပ) ၆၉၀/၁၁၊ မတရားအသင္း အက္ဥပေဒပုဒ္မ ၁၇(၁) ျဖင့္ ဒီဇင္ဘာ ၈ ရက္တြင္ အမႈဖြင့္ကာ ထပ္မံစစ္ေဆးလ်က္ရွိသည္။

http://moemaka.com/2011/12/mann-nyein-maung-arrested-at-mingaladon-intl/

Currently, rumors have spread around Rangoon that Mahn Nyein Maung is being detained at a interrogation cell under tight security in Rangoon’s Insein Prison. No one is allowed to talk to or visit him, according to a source close to both Insein Prison and the KNU.

Mahn Nyein Maung, a leading member of the Karen National Union (KNU) and a central committee member of the ethnic armed alliance, the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC), disappeared at China’s Kunming Airport in late July.

His family and other sources on the Sino-Burmese border said that Mahn Nyein Maung was picked up in July by immigration officials in the Yunnanese capital after being sent back from Bangkok where he was denied entry. It was reported that he was then deported from China to Burma.

Mahn Nyein Maung’s close friend, Maung Kyaw Mahn, said that one of the KNU leader’s daughters phoned him from USA and asked about her father’s whereabouts. She wanted to know where her father is and wanted to campaign for an amnesty for him, he said.

“She wants to campaign for his safe release,” said Maung Kyaw Mahn. “Even if it turns out that her father has been detained by the Burmese security forces, she wants to ensure that they do not kill him.”

He said that Mahn Nyein Maung’s daughter has already written a letter of appeal to the US government asking for help in securing her father’s release.

Despite earlier reports that Mahn Nyein Maung had been deported to Burma, sources close to Chinese and Burmese intelligence, however, said that he is reportedly now at a safe place close to the Sino-Burmese border.

The sources said Mahn Nyein Maung had earlier traveled to Yunnan from his home in Thailand to observe first-hand the armed conflict between ethnic armed groups and government troops near the  border.

One of the sources said that the authorities in Yunnan insisted that Mahn Nyein Maung buy an air ticket with his own money for a flight to Rangoon. However, he allegedly disappeared while being kept at a hotel before his flight to Rangoon.

More than one month after his disappearance and it was reported that he was in hands of Burmese intelligence officials. However, the government neither disclosed his whereabouts nor denied his arrest.

The KNU leadership announced that Mahn Nyein Maung had disappeared two months ago, and that he had not informed the KNU central committee members about any trip to China. Sources close to the KNU intelligence officials said the KNU also believed that Mahn Nyein Maung was arrested by the Burmese authorities.

Sources close to the Kunming authorities, however, said that Mahn Nyein Maung is more likely staying at the Sino-Burmese border, probably in an area controlled by an ethnic militia in the Wa region of eastern Shan State or in northern Burma.

When asked, Aung Myint of United Wa State Army told The Irrawaddy that he does not know the whereabouts of Mahn Nyein Maung.

When the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) heard that Mahn Nyein Maung had been picked up in Kunming in late July, they contacted the Chinese authorities—only to be told that the Karen leader had already been deported to Burma, according to sources close to the KIA.

The UNFC has also stated that Mahn Nyein Maung did not declare to the organization any intention to travel to China.

Mahn Nyein Maung was a former underground activist inside Burma. In 1960, he was arrested and sent to the Coco Islands, an infamous detention center for political prisoners located about 300 km off the Burmese mainland in the Indian Ocean.

Mahn Nyein Maung and two other political prisoners, Mahn Aung Kyi and Aung Ngwe, managed to escape from the island by floating across the Indian Ocean clutching driftwood. However, they were rearrested when they reached the Burmese mainland. It was the only known escape from the prison, known as “Burma’s Devil’s Island.”

Due to his extraordinary escape from the prison at Coco Island, Mahn Nyein Maung was sometimes described as “Burma’s Papillon” after the famous French prisoner Henri Charrière who escaped a penal colony in French Guyana. Like Charrière, Mahn Aung Kyi wrote and published a book about his experiences inside the brutal prison at Coco Island and his subsequent escape.