Poet's Widow Says Junta Removed His Organs

She says Khet Thi died after Myanmar regime hauled him in for interrogation
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted May 10, 2021 6:16 PM CDT
Poet's Widow Says Junta Removed His Organs
In this Friday, Feb. 19, 2021 photo, military trucks with soldiers inside are parked behind police standing guard behind a road barricade in Mandalay, Myanmar.   (AP Photo)

"They shoot in the head, but they don’t know the revolution is in the heart," poet Khet Thi wrote after the military coup in Myanmar. His widow says the junta brought him in for interrogation Saturday and returned his corpse the next day—with the organs removed. The widow, Chaw Su, told the BBC's Burmese-language service that she was also brought in for interrogation by soldiers and police Saturday, but her husband did not return. She said when authorities called Sunday morning and told her to meet her husband at a hospital around 100 miles away, she "thought it was just for a broken arm or something," but instead " he was at the morgue and his internal organs were taken out."

The 45-year-old resident of the central town of Shwebo is at least the third poet to be killed in the regime's brutal crackdown on coup opponents, reports Reuters. After the Feb. 1 coup, he wrote that he was a poet and a baker, not a fighter, but his attitude appeared to harden after the killings of hundreds of protesters. "My people are being shot and I can only throw back poems," he wrote. "But when you are sure your voice is not enough, then you need to choose a gun carefully. I will shoot." An activist group supporting political prisoners in Myanmar said the poet "died at the hospital after being tortured in the interrogation center." The group said the regime has killed nearly 800 civilians since the coup. (More Myanmar stories.)

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