Junta detains three administrators following Paletwa Twsp fighting

By DMG 27 May 2022

DMG Newsroom
27 May 2022, Paletwa 

Junta troops detained the administrator and two 10-household heads from Paletwa Township’s Abaung Thar village on Thursday after regime forces clashed with the Arakan Army (AA) earlier in the day. 

Family members are concerned about the detainees’ wellbeing as they have not been able to contact them, a villager told DMG. 

“They were reportedly taken for interrogation. We can’t call them; their phones are turned off. We heard that they were taken to Battalion 289,” said the villager. 

Another villager said junta troops took the three men as they had helped to carry colleagues who were wounded in Thursday’s fighting. 

Junta spokesman Major-General Zaw Min Tun was not available for comment.  

Light Infantry Battalion No. 289 provided artillery support for junta troops as they clashed with the Arakan Army near Abaung Thar village on Thursday, said residents. 

The Myanmar military and the AA reached an unofficial ceasefire in November 2020, after some two years of fighting. Only a handful of small-scale clashes have been reported since then, but military tensions are currently said to be running high in Arakan State. 

The regime has lately been searching for officials of the parallel administration run by the United League of Arakan (ULA), the political wing of the AA, in Arakan State villages. It has also detained a number of villagers over their alleged ties to the AA, a particularly sensitive change in law enforcement tactics given that the AA was removed from the regime’s list of terrorist groups in March 2021.