Malaysian authorities might deport up to 14 Myanmar nationals who were arrested at a demonstration to mark jailed pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s birthday, human rights activists said yesterday.
Police detained 16 Myanmar nationals at a rally outside a Kuala Lumpur shopping mall on Friday, but two of them were released after they were found to have valid immigration documents, said Latheefa Koya, a lawyer whose opposition party helped organize the demonstration.
At least five face the threat of being sent back to Myanmar, Latheefa said. The other nine are registered by the UN’s refugee agency as asylum seekers who fled their military-ruled country, so they might be allowed to remain in Malaysia, she said.
Khalid Abu Bakar, police chief of central Selangor state, said officials were investigating whether the detainees were illegal immigrants. Some of them would be handed to immigration officials within two weeks, he said, but it was not clear when they might be deported.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch urged Malaysia to free all the detainees, who joined the demonstration to protest Suu Kyi’s detention in Myanmar.
“By detaining Burmese asylum seekers who were calling for democracy in their homeland, Malaysia was broadcasting support for Burma’s despotic generals,” the group’s deputy Asia director, Elaine Pearson, said in a statement late on Tuesday.
The UN refugee agency has registered more than 48,000 refugees in Malaysia, most from Myanmar. But community leaders estimate the number of people from Myanmar living in Malaysia is about twice that.
Those caught staying illegally face arrest and can be whipped as punishment before being deported. The government said recently that those who flee persecution in Myanmar and are registered as refugees are generally not deported.
Concerts, candlelight vigils and other gatherings for Suu Kyi’s 64th birthday were held in cities worldwide last week. She has spent more than 13 of the past 19 years in detention without trial, mostly under house arrest.
Suu Kyi is being held in Yangon’s Insein Prison while being tried for violating the terms of her house arrest when an uninvited American man swam secretly to her closely guarded lakeside home last month and stayed two days.
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle. This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley. It is the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who said he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience. The outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate