By Hazel Gandhi
A disturbing video showing a young woman being brutally assaulted and finally shot to death by a group of armed insurgents in Myanmar is being falsely shared as an incident from Manipur to claim that a Christian Kuki woman was assaulted by armed civilians.
BOOM found that the claims are false and the video shows members of the People's Defence Force (PDF) in Myanmar executing a woman on suspicion of espionage.
The 3-minute long video shows several people in armed uniforms assaulting a woman while interrogating her. The woman, who is in handcuffs, is seen begging and pleading with them to stop. The perpetrators are seen using their rifles to hit her before blindfolding her, making her kneel in the middle of the road and shooting her in the head multiple times.
This video is being linked to the current clashes in Manipur between the Meitei and Kuki communities that first began in May 2023. A caption on Twitter reads, "#Manipur has gone out of control of Modi & Shah. Videos have come to light where armed civilians are torturing and ultimately shooting to death a kukki Christian young girl. Manipur is on fire & Modi is silent. The girl was then shot in the head in cold blood, the part of the video not shared."
Click here to view the post and here for an archive.
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FACT-CHECK
BOOM found that the video is from an incident that took place in Myanmar's Tamu town in June 2022, videos of which went viral in December. The incident has no links to the ongoing conflict in Manipur.
A reverse image search of one of the keyframes from the video on Yandex led us to a report published on December 6, 2022, about how the National Unity Government (NUG) responded to an incident in Tamu where a woman was brutally assaulted and killed by the People's Defence Force (PDF) and called it a "contravention" to their code of conduct.
The BOOM Myanmar team also confirmed that the video is from that region, not Manipur.
The NUG, a government-in-exile which emerged after the military coup against Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021 formed the People's Defence Force in May the same year. The PDF, a rebel group fighting against the Tatmadaw, or the Myanmar military, is a group of more than 60,000 soldiers that often fight alongside other ethnic armies in Myanmar to restore democracy.
Nobel Peace Prize awardee and leader of Myanmar's National League of Democracy (NLD), Aung San Suu Kyi, was overthrown in February 2021 following a military coup. The NLD had secured a landslide win in the November 2022 elections, which the military rejected by claiming election fraud. Mass protests by the public led to further violence, raids, and arrests by the military who were unable to establish control over the country. Since then, the crackdown by the military has become increasingly violent, including reports of bombing civilians, among other human rights abuses.
Taking a cue from the news report, we looked up the incident and found a report by Myanmar Now published on December 6, 2022 that carried a visual from our video.
According to this report which quotes Naing Htoo Aung, secretary of the NUG’s defence ministry, the incident took place in June 2022 in the town of Tamu, which borders an Indian town called Moreh in Manipur. The NUG only became aware of the incident after the graphic videos emerged on social media around December. Naing Htoo Aun also informed that some perpetrators from the video belonged to the 4th Battalion of Tamu District's PDF.
The report also identifies the woman as 25-year-old Aye Mar Tun who was accused of being involved in the killing of a PDF member by some military junta personnel. She was being interrogated in this matter and accused of being a member and informant of the Pyu Saw Htee militia, a group working under the Myanmar military.
According to Eleven Myanmar, the video was posted on a pro-military Telegram channel and made viral.
On December 5, the NUG put out a statement on its official Facebook page regarding the incident and how they had "directed relevant officials to investigate urgently the events in detail, and to find out whether members of the People’s Defence Force have been involved in any way." The statement also reminded its military groups to not "fall into the trap of acting like the forces of the terrorist military council by committing atrocities and barbarities."
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(With inputs from BOOM Myanmar).
