{"id":3949,"date":"2018-02-09T14:37:48","date_gmt":"2018-02-09T08:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/equalitymyanmar.org\/new-eng\/?p=3949"},"modified":"2026-01-28T12:45:36","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T06:15:36","slug":"massacre-in-myanmar-a-reuters-special-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/equalitymyanmar.org\/?p=3949","title":{"rendered":"Massacre in Myanmar (A REUTERS SPECIAL REPORT)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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How Myanmar forces burned, looted and killed in a remote village<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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On Sept. 2, Buddhist villagers and Myanmar troops killed 10 Rohingya men in Myanmar\u2019s restive Rakhine state. Reuters uncovered the massacre and has pieced together how it unfolded. During the reporting of this article, two Reuters journalists were arrested by Myanmar police.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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By WA LONE, KYAW SOE OO,\u00a0SIMON LEWIS<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0ANTONI SLODKOWSKI<\/a><\/p>\n

Filed\u00a0

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INN DIN, Myanmar \u2013 Bound together, the 10 Rohingya Muslim captives watched their Buddhist neighbors dig a shallow grave. Soon afterwards, on the morning of Sept. 2, all 10 lay dead. At least two were hacked to death by Buddhist villagers. The rest were shot by Myanmar troops, two of the gravediggers said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne grave for 10 people,\u201d said Soe Chay, 55, a retired soldier from Inn Din\u2019s Rakhine Buddhist community who said he helped dig the pit and saw the killings. The soldiers shot each man two or three times, he said. \u201cWhen they were being buried, some were still making noises. Others were already dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

The killings in the coastal village of Inn Din marked another bloody episode in the ethnic violence sweeping northern Rakhine state, on Myanmar\u2019s western fringe. Nearly\u00a0690,000\u00a0Rohingya Muslims have fled their villages and crossed the border into Bangladesh since August. None of Inn Din\u2019s 6,000 Rohingya remained in the village as of October.<\/p>\n

The Rohingya accuse the army of arson, rapes and killings aimed at rubbing them out of existence in this mainly Buddhist nation of 53 million. The United Nations has said the army may have committed genocide; the United States has called the action ethnic cleansing. Myanmar says its \u201cclearance operation\u201d is a legitimate response to attacks by Rohingya insurgents.<\/p>\n

Rohingya trace their presence in Rakhine back centuries. But most Burmese consider them to be unwanted immigrants from Bangladesh; the army refers to the Rohingya as \u201cBengalis.\u201d In recent years, sectarian tensions have risen and the government has confined more than 100,000 Rohingya in camps where they have limited access to food, medicine and education.<\/p>\n

Reuters has pieced together what happened in Inn Din in the days leading up to the killing of the 10 Rohingya \u2013 eight men and two high school students in their late teens.<\/p>\n

Until now, accounts of the violence against the Rohingya in Rakhine state have been provided only by its victims.\u00a0The Reuters reconstruction draws for the first time on interviews with Buddhist villagers who confessed to torching Rohingya homes, burying bodies and killing Muslims.<\/p>\n

This account also marks the first time soldiers and paramilitary police have been implicated\u00a0by\u00a0testimony from security personnel themselves. Members of the paramilitary police\u00a0gave Reuters insider descriptions of the operation to drive out the Rohingya from Inn Din, confirming that\u00a0the military\u00a0played the lead role in the campaign.<\/p>\n

The slain men\u2019s families, now sheltering in Bangladesh refugee camps, identified the victims through photographs shown to them by Reuters. The dead men were fishermen, shopkeepers, the two teenage students and an Islamic teacher.<\/p>\n

Three photographs, provided to Reuters by a Buddhist village elder, capture key moments in the massacre at Inn Din, from the Rohingya men\u2019s detention by soldiers\u00a0in the early evening of Sept. 1 to their execution shortly after 10 a.m. on Sept. 2. Two photos \u2013 one taken the first day, the other on the day of the killings \u2013 show the 10 captives lined up in a row, kneeling. The final photograph shows the men\u2019s bloodied bodies piled in the shallow grave.<\/p>\n

The Reuters investigation of the Inn Din massacre was what prompted Myanmar police authorities to arrest two of the news agency\u2019s reporters. The reporters, Burmese citizens Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, were detained on Dec. 12 for allegedly obtaining confidential documents relating to Rakhine.<\/p>\n

Then, on Jan. 10, the military issued a statement that confirmed portions of what Wa Lone, Kyaw Soe Oo and their colleagues were preparing to report, acknowledging that 10 Rohingya men were massacred in the village. It confirmed that Buddhist villagers attacked some of the men with swords and soldiers shot the others dead.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n