Senior Myanmar police jailed over Rakhine raids
>> YANGON: Three senior Myanmar police officers have been jailed for failing to block deadly raids on border posts in October that threw northern Rakhine state into crisis, a police spokesman said yesterday.
The attacks left nine officers dead and unleashed a four-month military crackdown as soldiers swooped in to help police hunt for Rohingya militants blamed for the raids.
More than 70,000 of the Muslim minority have fled the area for neighbouring Bangladesh, bringing with them harrowing accounts of systematic rape, killings and torture at the hands of security officers.
UN i nvestigators who i nterviewed escapees said the violence was so severe it “very likely” amounted to crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.
A police spokesman yesterday said three senior officers were handed between two and three years in jail for allowing the raids to happen under their watch.
“Police were informed by villagers in advance before the attack. But police commanders failed to take action and rejected the information, assuming it was impossible,” said Pol Col Myo Thu Soe.
Information Ministry director Ye Naing said an official investigation probed how the poorly trained and barely armed insurgents could successfully stage the attacks.
The government says the militants, who stole weapons and ammunition in the raids, have links to radical Islamists abroad.
The court sentenced the three senior officers in the border town of Maungdaw to one to three years in prison, Ye Naing said.
“They were jailed because they were guilty of negligence regarding security during the Oct 9 attacks,” he said.
Ye Naing could not specify the date of the sentencing or details of the investigation. Several other high-ranking police officers were still under investigation by the military-controlled Ministry of Home Affairs, he added.
The International Crisis Group thinktank described the October raids as the start of a new Rohingya insurgency in a region rife with tension between the stateless group and Myanmar’s Buddhist population.
The group said the attackers were recruited by a Saudi-backed network focused on advancing the political rights of the Rohingya, who have suffered under years of discrimination from a government that denies them citizenship.
After months of waving off allegations that soldiers were carrying out grave rights abuses in the recent crackdown, Myanmar’s government has recently pledged to investigate the claims. Yet there has been little fallout for security forces so far.
Five police officers were sentenced to two months detention by an internal police tribunal over a video showing them abusing Rohingya civilians.