Myanmar soldiers jailed over deaths

YANGON: Seven Myanmar soldiers have been sentenced to ‘‘10 years in prison with hard labour in a remote area’’ for participating in a massacre of 10 Rohingya Muslim men in a village in northwestern Rakhine state last September, the army says.

The military said in a statement published on CommanderinChief Min Aung Hlaing’s office Facebook page that seven soldiers have had ‘‘action taken against them’’ for ‘‘contributing and participating in murder’’.

The massacre was being investigated by two Reuters journalists — Wa Lone (31) and Kyaw Soe Oo (28), who were subsequently arrested in December and are still behind bars facing charges of violating the country’s Official Secrets Act.

On February 11, three days after Reuters published its story about the killings at Inn Dinn, authorities said the military opened an internal investigation independently.

The Rohingya men, from the northern Rakhine village of Inn Din, were buried in a mass grave in early September after being hacked to death or shot by Buddhist neighbours and soldiers.

The murders were part of a larger army crackdown on the Rohingya, beset by allegations of murder, rape, arson and looting, unleashed in response to Rohingya militant attacks on security forces in late August. The United Nations and the US called it ethnic cleansing, an allegation Myanmar disputes.

The military said the 10 Rohingya men belonged to a group of 200 militants who attacked security forces. Buddhist villagers denied that account and Rohingyas said soldiers plucked the 10 from among hundreds of men, women and children who had sought safety on a nearby beach. — Reuters