Myanmar junta ramped up mass killings, air strikes: UN rights office

BANGKOK, Thailand: Myanmar´s military escalated its use of mass killings, air and artillery strikes in the past year as it struggles to crush resistance to its coup, the UN´s rights office said on Tuesday.

The military´s ousting of Aung San Suu Kyi´s government in 2021 sparked a huge backlash and it is now battling opponents across swaths of the country.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) had found a “seemingly endless spiral of military violence” between April 2022 and July 2023, it said in its latest report on Myanmar.

Through interviews and open source data it had found “a sharp rise” in serious human rights violations “including the increase... of incidents in which 10 or more individuals were killed”. Investigators had now documented 22 instances of mass killings of 10 or more people, according to rights chief Volker Turk.