CNN
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A courtroom in military-run Myanmar has sentenced Aung San Suu Kyi, the nation’s deposed former chief and Nobel Peace Prize winner, to 3 extra years in jail for corruption, a supply accustomed to the case advised CNN, extending her complete jail time period to 26 years.
Wednesday’s verdict is the newest in a string of punishments meted out towards the 77-year-old, a figurehead of opposition to many years of army rule who led Myanmar for 5 years earlier than being compelled from energy in a coup in early 2021.
Suu Kyi was discovered responsible of receiving $500,000 in bribes from a neighborhood tycoon, a cost she denied, based on the supply. Her legal professionals have stated the sequence of crimes leveled towards her are politically motivated.
Suu Kyi is at the moment being held in solitary confinement at a jail within the capital Naypyidaw.
Final month, Suu Kyi was discovered responsible of electoral fraud and sentenced to 3 years in jail with laborious labor, in a trial associated to the November 2020 normal election that her Nationwide League for Democracy received in a landslide, defeating a celebration created by the army.
It was the primary time Suu Kyi had been sentenced to laborious labor because the 2021 army coup. She was given the identical punishment in a separate trial underneath a earlier administration in 2009 however that sentence was commuted.
Suu Kyi has additionally beforehand been discovered responsible of offenses starting from graft to election violations.
Rights teams have repeatedly expressed issues concerning the punishment of pro-democracy activists within the nation because the army seized energy.
Additionally sentenced Wednesday was Toru Kubota, 26, a Japanese journalist who acquired a further three years in jail on expenses of violating an immigration legislation, Japan’s Ministry of Overseas Affairs advised CNN.
That sentence comes along with the ten years Kubota acquired final week on expenses of sedition and violating a legislation on digital communications. These expenses relate to his filming of an anti-government protest in July, a Japanese diplomat stated.
The ministry stated the Japanese authorities will proceed to ask Myanmar authorities to launch Kubota “on the earliest potential date.”
Kubota was arrested by plainclothes police in Yangon, the place he was filming a documentary that he had been engaged on for a number of years, based on a Change.org petition calling for his launch.
In July, the army junta executed two outstanding pro-democracy activists and two different males accused of terrorism, following a trial condemned by the UN and rights teams.
