A party source reported to AFP that Aung San Suu Kyi, a close ally of the detained Myanmar democracy leader, passed away on Monday ( October 7 ), days after being released from junta custody on medical grounds.
Zaw Myint Maung, 72, a member of Aung San Suu Kyi’s family and a leader of the National League for Democracy ( NLD ), spent nearly 20 years in prison for defying Myanmar’s military.
He was arrested following the government’s latest revolution in 2021 and jailed for fraud and other fees. He lately received medical clearance.
” We got assurance of his death. It’s a great loss for us as he was one of our NLD vice-chairmen”, a mature group source told AFP, requesting privacy to speak to the media.
Zaw Myint Maung, according to the cause, had cancer.
” We regret losing him in this difficult situation, even though we were aware that we might gain him one moment.” With the rulers we have, we must move forward for politics.
Following the 2021 revolt, which ended a 10-year test with politics and brought Southeast Asia back under military rule, Zaw Myint Maung and other top Legislature figures were taken into custody.
In 1988, he spearheaded a doctors ‘ strike as part of the massive pro-democracy upheavals that brought Aung San Suu Kyi into the limelight in Burma, then known as Burma.
He quit his job in a school biology office in 1989 and joined the NLD.
He was afterward imprisoned by the military for about 20 years because of his engagement.
After the commanders enacted political reforms and the NLD won a landslide in the 2015 votes, he became the chief minister of the main Mandalay region, home to Myanmar’s next area of Mandalay.
Aung San Suu Kyi described him as a “real extreme and a friend who has been together with us since the very beginning of our group” the year before.
The European Union’s group to Myanmar said Zaw Myint Maung had been charged on “fallacious social basis” and slammed the “inhumane and degrading” circumstances of his confinement.
” His forgive… just days before his death, was not a sign of true clemency”, it said in a blog on X.