The 77-year-old Nobel Peace Prize, was found guilty of having accepted $ 550,000 in bribes from a local businessman, Maung Weik. Already convicted for other reasons, she risks more than one hundred and twenty years in prison.
The Burmese junta continues to charge Aung San Suu Kyi. The former leader, overturned by the coup d’état of February 2021, was sentenced on Wednesday October 12 to six years in additional prison, for corruption, in a river trial denounced as a political by the international community.
The 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, 77, was sentenced to “two three-year prison sentences” which were confused, a source close to the France-Presse (AFP) told the agency File, which means that it must spend three years behind bars for these two cases. Aung San Suu Kyi “is in good health. His lawyers will appeal, as for other cases,” said this source.
She was found guilty of having accepted bribes of a local businessman, Maung Weik. A chain of state broadcast an admission video of the businessman confessing last year that he had given $ 550,000 (566,314 euros) over several years in Aung San Suu Kyi. He distributed money to his party officials, the National League for Democracy, to make his business prosper, he explained.
risk hundred and twenty years in prison
Arrested at the time of the putsch, which ended a decade of democratic transition in Burma, the fallen leader was placed in an isolation in a prison in Naycyidaw at the end of June, hence her trial, started over a year ago, continues behind closed doors.
She had already been sentenced to twenty-three years’ imprisonment for various reasons, including electoral fraud and corruption. It risks more than a hundred and twenty years behind bars. Aung San Suu Kyi, who claims his innocence, is also accused in five other corruption cases, which could increase his total of prison years.
Many voices denounce a judicial relentlessness, which would be based on political reasons, with the aim of definitively excluding the daughter of the hero of independence, a great winner of the 2015 and 2020 elections.
Several of his relatives were sentenced to heavy penalties. A former deputy for his party, sentenced to death, Phyo Zeya Thaw, was executed at the end of July.
“Simulacres de trial”
“These simulacres of trials against her and her allies cannot be taken seriously, despite the judicial varnish”, reacted a spokesperson for Amnesty International to AFP. “The Burmese army has stuck false accusation on False accusation on Aung San Suu Kyi, as part of a wider campaign to enclose and silence all opponents,” continued the human rights NGO.
The junta defends herself from these accusations and even promises to open negotiations with Aung San Suu Kyi once her trial is finished. The army also hopes to organize elections in the summer of 2023, as soon as the country is “in peace and stable”, according to its leader, Min Aung Hlaing, who also announced a “reform” of the electoral system.
Since the coup d’etat that plunged the country into a bloody conflict, more than 2,300 civilians have been killed by the security forces, according to the count of a local NGO. The junta, who accuses her opponents, has more than 3,900.
The United Nations, who denounced “ever -increasing evidence” of crimes against humanity targeting women and children, announced at the beginning of October that 1.3 million civilians were still displaced due to Hostilities.
Isolated on the international scene, Burma was not invited to the next summit of the association of the Nations of Southeast Asia (ASEAN) in November in Cambodia.