Burma: Aung San Suu Kyi sentenced for corruption to six additional years in prison

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Ex-Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kii, already sentenced to eleven years in prison, suffered an additional six-year prison sentence on Monday for corruption, a source close to the government told AFP. folder. 

The Nobel Peace Prize winner, charged with a multitude of offenses by the ruling junta since the February 2021 coup, faces decades in prison at the end of her trial.

< p>Four counts of corruption have been brought against her.

Aung San Suu Kii, 77, appeared in court in good health, and did not comment after the reading of the judgment, according to this source.

Arrested at the time of the February 1, 2021 military coup that ended a decade of democratic transition in Burma, she was placed in solitary confinement in a prison in Naypyidaw at the end of June.

Her trial, which began more than a year ago, continues inside the penitentiary centre. The latter is held behind closed doors, his lawyers prohibited from speaking to the press and international organizations.

She is the target of a multitude of offenses: violation of a law on state secrets dating from colonial times, electoral fraud, sedition, corruption…

Many observers denounce this procedure solely motivated, according to them, by political considerations: definitively excluding Aung San Suu Kii, daughter of the hero of independence and big winner of the 2015 and 2020 elections, from the political arena.

Several relatives of the 1991 Nobel Prize winner have already been sentenced to heavy sentences.

A former member of his party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), was executed in July , along with three other pro-democracy activists sentenced to death.

Aung San Suu Kii spent nearly fifteen years under house arrest under previous military dictatorships. 

The coup of State of February 2021 threw the country into chaos. Nearly 2,100 civilians were killed by the security forces and 15,000 arrested, according to a local NGO.

The army seized power by force under the pretext of alleged fraud in the elections of the previous year, won overwhelmingly by Aung San Suu Kii's party. The junta promises a new election in 2023.