As part of a prisoner amnesty to commemorate the nation’s National Victory Day, Myanmar’s military-run government reportedly released and deported an Australian scholar, a Japanese filmmaker, and an ex-British ambassador.
The Voice of Myanmar and Yangon Media Group were informed on Thursday by the government’s spokesperson, Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, that Sean Turnell, Toru Kubota, and Vicky Bowman, as well as an unnamed American, were being released and deported.
Myanmar’s government-run Although there was no immediate independent confirmation that the reports had been made public, MRTV eventually corroborated them.
Security personnel detained Turnell, 58, an associate professor of economics at Macquarie University in Sydney, at a hotel in Yangon. For breaking both the immigration law and the country’s official secrets statute, he was given a three-year prison sentence in September.
Kubota, a 26-year-old documentary filmmaker from Tokyo, was detained on July 30 in Yangon by plainclothes police after recording a brief flash rally against the military coup last year. He received a 10-year prison term after being found guilty last month by the prison court of inciting for taking part in the protest.
In August, Bowman, 56, a former British ambassador to Myanmar, was detained in Yangon alongside her husband, a citizen of that country. In September, she received a one-year prison sentence for failing to register her address.
