Reuters publishes account of Myanmar massacre

BANGKOK — The news agency Reuters has published a detailed investigation into the massacre of 10 Rohingya men by Myanmar soldiers and villagers, saying the work led the Myanmar authorities to arrest two of its reporters.

The article, which was published Friday, describes how soldiers and Buddhist villagers carried out the killings in September and buried the victims in a single grave. Based on eyewitness accounts, it includes photographs of the Rohingya men tied up and kneeling before their execution, and images after their deaths.

Pictures taken later show what appear to be human bone fragments at the site of the mass grave.

Two of the four journalists who worked on the report, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, were arrested in December and face trial on charges of violating Myanmar’s colonial-era Official Secrets Act. They have been denied bail and face up to 14 years in prison.

The massacre described in the Reuters report occurred during a wave of attacks on the Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine state last year that Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson said “constitutes ethnic cleansing.”

At least 6,700 Rohingya met violent deaths, including 730 children younger than 5, and hundreds of villages were destroyed as the military and Buddhist residents of the area sought revenge for deadly attacks on police posts by Rohingya insurgents.

About 700,000 Rohingya have fled across the border into Bangladesh to escape the violence.

In its 4,500-word article, Reuters documented the killings of the 10 Rohingya men in Inn Din village, about 30 miles north of Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine state.

The report identified the victims by name and described them as fishermen, shopkeepers and an Islamic teacher. Two were high school students. They ranged in age from 17 to 45.

In January, the military confirmed 10 Rohingya men were killed in Inn Din by villagers and soldiers. It said the men were terrorists who had attacked security forces, and that the soldiers had decided to kill them because intense fighting made it impossible to keep them in custody. The army said it would take action against those involved.

The photographs of the 10 victims before and after the killings were provided by a Buddhist village elder who said he did not want to see the events repeated.