Reuters reporters freed from prison in Myanmar
HONG KONG - Two Pulitzerwinning Reuters journalists held in Myanmar for more than 500 days for their coverage of the crackdown on Rohingya Muslims were freed from jail Tuesday.
Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were arrested in December 2017 and later were charged with violating the country’s colonial-era secrets act. They were accused of possessing secret documents, but they were widely believed to have been set up, lured into a meeting with police officers who handed over rolled-up documents. The two journalists and their lawyers have insisted that they were merely doing their job as reporters.
The pair have been bestowed with honours and awards for their investigation into a massacre of 10 Rohingya Muslims, the story they were working on at the time of their arrest.the honours include the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, which they won in April. Reuters posted a video and photos, taken at some distance, of the two smiling journalists on Tuesday walking out of jail. A live video shows a crowd of cameras surrounding the two as they exit the gates of Yangon’s Insein prison, their few possessions in their hands.
“I’m really happy and excited to see my family and my colleagues,” Wa Lone said in brief comments to media upon his release. “I can’t wait to go to my newsroom.”
The two journalists have come to be a symbol of Myanmar’s fading democratic hope and promise under its Nobel laureate civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. Yet her government has clamped down on free expression and continued to use archaic and widely criticized laws to imprison those like Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo.