Former U.S. President Bill Clinton on Monday called for the immediate release of two Reuters journalists being held in Myanmar.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton on Monday called for the immediate release of two Reuters journalists being held in Myanmar.
"A free press is critical to a free society - the detention of journalists anywhere is unacceptable. The Reuters journalists being held in Myanmar should be released immediately," Clinton said in a Twitter post.
Myanmar has accused Reuters reporters Wa Lone, 31, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 27, of breaching the country's Official Secrets Act, a little-used law from colonial rule.
They are due to appear in court in the main city of Yangon on Wednesday. It will be their second appearance in court and the prosecutor could request that charges are filed against them.
On December 13, Myanmar's Ministry of Information said in a statement on its Facebook page that the journalists and two policemen face charges under the British colonial-era Official Secrets Act. The 1923 law carries a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.
The reporters “illegally acquired information with the intention to share it with foreign media,” said the statement, which was accompanied by a photo of the pair in handcuffs.
It said they were detained at a police station on the outskirts of Yangon, the southeast Asian nation’s main city.
Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo went missing on Tuesday evening after they had been invited to meet police officials over dinner.
Reuters’ driver Myothant Tun dropped them off at Battalion 8’s compound at around 8 pm and the two reporters and two police officers headed to a nearby restaurant. The journalists did not return to the car.
Wa Lone, who joined Reuters in July 2016, has covered a range of stories, including the flight of Rohingya refugees from Rakhine in 2016 and, in much larger numbers, this year.
He has written about military land grabs and the killing of ruling party lawyer Ko Ni in January. This year he jointly won an honorable mention from the Society of Publishers in Asia for Reuters coverage of the Rakhine crisis in 2016.
He previously worked for The Myanmar Times, where he covered Myanmar’s historic 2015 elections, and People’s Age, a local weekly newspaper, where his editor was Myanmar’s current Minister of Information Pe Myint.
Kyaw Soe Oo, an ethnic Rakhine Buddhist from state capital Sittwe, has worked with Reuters since September.
He has covered the impact of the Aug. 25 attacks on police and army posts in the northern Rakhine, and reported from the central part of the state where local Buddhists have been enforcing segregation between Rohingya and Rakhine communities.
He previously worked for Root Investigation Agency, a local news outlet focused on Rakhine issues.
“I have been arrest” were the four words that Wa Lone texted to Reuters Myanmar Bureau Chief Antoni Slodkowski on Tuesday evening to let him know what was happening. Very soon after that Wa Lone’s phone appeared to have been switched off.
Over the next 24 hours, Reuters colleagues in Yangon filed a missing persons report, went to three police stations, and asked a series of government officials what had happened to the two reporters. They got no official information until Wednesday evening.
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