Myanmar’s military government increases Aung San Suu Kyi’s prison term

• A court in the military-run nation of Myanmar has sentenced Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to a further three years in prison.
• The 77-year-old was accused of collecting bribes.
• A judge found her responsible for two charges of corruption.

A court in the military-run nation of Myanmar has sentenced Nobel laureate and ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi to a further three years in prison, bringing her total time behind bars to 26 years.

The 77-year-old was accused of collecting bribes; on Wednesday, a judge found her responsible for two charges of corruption and sentenced her to three years in prison on each count.

She now faces a 26-year prison sentence when the judge decided that the sentences would run concurrently, adding three years to her already lengthy sentence.

Aung San Suu Kyi has called the accusations made against her ridiculous and has refuted all of the allegations.

In the nation’s capital, Naypyidaw, she is being imprisoned in solitary confinement, and all of her trials have taken place behind closed doors. She is also facing five more corruption allegations in the trial.

Reporting from Bangkok for Al Jazeera, Tony Cheng said the accusations against Aung San Suu Kyi were made by a well-known businessman who has previously had legal issues of his own.

“He claimed that he frequently went to her place. For favorable treatment in government tenders his company had made, he left her packages wrapped in black paper with values ranging from 100 to 150,000 US dollars,” Cheng claimed.

After the coup, those claims were carried live on Myanmar TV. He is a fairly shaky or unreliable witness in his own right. He had already done time in prison for narcotics possession. She was nevertheless convicted guilty of both charges today, according to Cheng.

According to Cheng, the goal of the court rulings and sentencing appeared to be to “totally remove Aung San Suu Kyi from the political arena.”

Military critics have long claimed that the accusations leveled against Aung San Suu Kyi are intended to prevent her from ever entering politics again or attempting to overthrow the military’s hold on power.

According to Cheng, “I believe they are fully aware that if there were any kind of election and Aung San Suu Kyi was on the ballot, she would win handily as she has in the past.”

The United Nations reports that since the coup in February 2021, more than one million people have been displaced, more than 2,300 people have died, and more than 15,000 people have been imprisoned.

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