Myanmar evicts family of officer who testified on entrapment

YANGON, Myanmar – Myanmar police on Saturday evicted the family of a police officer who testified that he and others had been ordered to entrap two reporters working for the Reuters news agency who are facing charges that could get them up to 14 years in prison, the officer's wife said.

The reporters, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, have been detained since Dec. 12 on charges of violating the colonial-era Official Secrets Act. The two helped cover the crisis in Myanmar's Rakhine state, where a brutal counterinsurgency operation last year drove about 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to neighboring Bangladesh.

Police Capt. Moe Yan Naing told a court Friday that his superior had arranged for two policemen to meet the reporters at a restaurant and hand over documents described as "important secret papers" in order to entrap them.

On Saturday, Moe Yan Naing's wife, Daw Tuu, said she and her daughter were ordered to move out of their police housing in the capital, Naypyitaw.

"A police officer called us this morning and said we have to move out of the housing immediately and that's the order from the superior," Daw Tuu said, sobbing.

Moe Yan Naing said he and other colleagues who had been interviewed earlier by Wa Lone about their activities in Rakhine had been interrogated under the direction of Brig. Gen. Tin Ko Ko of the 8th Security Police Battalion.

The police department's action against Moe Yan Naing's family caused an outcry in Myanmar.

"This is an outrageous move," said Robert Sann Aung, a human rights lawyer. "This is to give an example to other police in the country to keep silent from telling the truth."

The court in Yangon has been holding hearings since January. The defendants' lawyers have asked the court to drop the case against the pair, saying prosecutors failed to present enough evidence to support the case, but the judge denied the motion.