‘Mom, please just kill me’: A world looks away from Myanmar’s descent into horror - World Forum Blog 24
‘Mom, please just kill me’: A world looks away from Myanmar’s descent into horror - World Forum Blog 24
Bhone Tayza had been impatient to start school. A broken arm had kept the 7-year-old home while the other kids began their lessons, but now that his cast was off, he couldn’t wait to join in.
His mother, Thida Win, was still worried. “Just stay home for today,” she recalls telling her son on his third day back at school last September – but he went anyway.
Hours later, the airstrike hit.
Thida Win was home, in the central Sagaing region of Myanmar, when army helicopters began firing “heavy weapons” including machine guns near her house, she said. She took cover until the shooting stopped, then sprinted to the nearby school, frantic. She finally found Bhone in a classroom, barely alive in a pool of blood, next to the bodies of other children.
“He asked me twice, ‘Mom, please just kill me,’” she said. “He was in so much pain.” Surrounded by armed soldiers of Myanmar’s military who had swarmed the school grounds, she pulled Bhone into her lap, praying and doing her best to comfort him until he died.
He was one of at least 13 victims, including seven children, in the September attack – and among the thousands killed nationwide since the military seized power in a coup on February 1, 2021.
The junta ousted democratically elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was later sentenced to 33 years in jail during secretive trials; cracked down on anti-coup protests; arrested journalists and political prisoners; and executed several leading pro-democracy activists, drawing condemnation from the United Nations and rights groups.
Source: CNN News
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