![]() Wa Lone later remembered feeling uneasy: Why had the policeman insisted on him coming right away? The reporters discussed turning around. It was a world beyond the reach of Wa Lone, the son of a rice farmer from a village of a few hundred people.Ībout halfway to the Battalion 8 compound, the SUV was stuck in traffic. Setting out at about 6 p.m., the bureau’s white Nissan SUV crossed an overpass that overlooks Inya Lake, ringed by homes of Myanmar’s elite, including the nation’s de facto leader, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. ![]() That man, 27-year-old Kyaw Soe Oo, was visiting from Rakhine State and had recently been hired by the news agency. In the background, milling around with assault rifles, were members of Battalion 8.īefore going to meet the lance corporal, Wa Lone checked in with the Reuters bureau chief, Antoni Slodkowski, who told him to take another reporter along. Another, taken while they were still alive, showed them on their knees. One picture showed the men’s bodies, hacked and shot to death, in a shallow grave. And he’d gotten his hands on explosive material: photographs of the 10 men before and after they were killed. He was working on a story about the murder of 10 members of the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority during a military operation in western Rakhine State. Wa Lone, whose large eyeglasses rest on chubby cheeks, had spent weeks looking into Battalion 8. ![]() “He told me that if I don’t come now,” Wa Lone would later recall in a Myanmar courtroom, “I might not be able to meet him because he is about to transfer to another region.” Night was falling around the golden spires of the pagodas in this former capital city. The policeman urged Wa Lone, a 31-year-old reporter with Reuters, to meet him immediately at the battalion’s barracks on the outskirts of Yangon. ![]() FILE PHOTO: Detained Reuters journalist Kyaw Soe Oo carries his daughter Moe Thin Wai Zin while being escorted by police during a break at a court hearing in Yangon, Myanmar February 1, 2018.
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