Myanmar’s junta has executed 4 prisoners, together with a former lawmaker from Aung San Suu Kyi’s celebration, state media stated on Monday, within the nation’s first use of capital punishment in many years.

Phyo Zeya Thaw, a former lawmaker from Suu Kyi’s Nationwide League for Democracy (NLD) who was arrested in November, was sentenced to dying in January for offences below anti-terrorism legal guidelines. Distinguished democracy activist Kyaw Min Yu – higher often called “Jimmy” – acquired the identical sentence from the army tribunal.

The 2 different males and sentenced to dying for killing a girl they alleged was an informer for the junta in Yangon.

The 4 have been executed for main “brutal and inhumane terror acts”, the International New Mild of Myanmar newspaper stated. The paper stated the executions have been carried out “below the jail’s process” with out saying when or how the 4 males have been killed.

The junta has sentenced dozens of anti-coup activists to dying as a part of its crackdown on dissent after seizing energy final yr, however Myanmar has not carried out an execution for many years.

The junta was closely criticised by worldwide powers after they introduced final month their intention to hold out the executions.

United Nations secretary basic António Guterres condemned the junta’s choice on the time, calling it “a blatant violation to the appropriate to life, liberty and safety of individual”.

Phyo Zeya Thaw had been accused of orchestrating a number of assaults on regime forces, together with a gun assault on a commuter prepare in Yangon in August that killed 5 policemen. A hip-hop pioneer whose subversive rhymes irked the earlier junta, he was jailed in 2008 for membership in an unlawful organisation and possession of overseas forex.

He was elected to parliament representing Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD within the 2015 elections, which ushered in a transition to civilian rule.

The nation’s army alleged voter fraud throughout elections in 2020 – which the NLD received by a landslide – as justification for its coup on 1 February final yr.

Aung San Suu Kyi has been detained since then and faces a slew of fees in a junta court docket that would see her face a jail sentence of greater than 150 years.

Kyaw Min Yu, who rose to prominence throughout Myanmar’s 1988 pupil rebellion in opposition to the nation’s earlier army regime, was arrested in an in a single day raid in October.