YANGON: Thousands of
mourners gathered on Monday to bury a top Muslim lawyer and adviser to Aung San
Suu Kyi, who was gunned down outside Yangon airport in what the ruling party
called a political assassination.
Ko Ni, a legal adviser to
the National League for Democracy, was shot in the head on Sunday afternoon as
he waited outside the airport while holding his grandson.
His killing, in a country
where political murders are rare, sent shockwaves through both Myanmar’s
already hard-pressed Muslim community and the ruling party.
Police have not said what
prompted the murder. Ko Ni, 63, was a prominent Muslim figure who spoke out
against the increasingly vocal anti-Islamic sentiments of Buddhist hard-liners
and criticized the powerful military’s grip on power.
Distraught relatives were
joined by senior NLD figures, imams, Buddhist monks and members of the public
who crammed into a Muslim cemetery on the outskirts of Yangon on Monday
afternoon.
“This is a very cruel and
ugly tragedy,” Moe Zaw, a 37-year-old Muslim mourner, told AFP.
Both the NLD and Ko Ni’s
family suspect he was targeted because of his politics, with the ruling party
describing the murder as a “terrorist act.”
The country’s de facto
leader Suu Kyi has yet to comment on the killing.
But the office of her
appointed President Htin Kyaw described the murder as an attempt to “destroy
the stability of the state” and appealed for calm.
A taxi driver who tried to
stop the gunman was also killed. The attacker, named by police as 53-year-old
Kyi Lin, was arrested at the scene.
A harrowing photo
circulating on social media showed what appeared to be the moment the gunman,
standing behind Ko Ni as he held his grandson, took aim.
His daughter Yin Nwe Khaing
said she brought her young son to greet his grandfather at the airport, adding
her father had made enemies because he had been a prominent Muslim voice.
“As we are from a different
religion there were many people who did not like and hated it. I think that
also could be a reason (for his murder),” she told DVB TV.
Ko Ni had just returned from
a government delegation visit to Indonesia where regional leaders were
discussing sectarian tensions in Rakhine state.
Myanmar’s army has waged a
crackdown on the mainly Muslim Rohingya community in the state, which has
prompted tens of thousands of them to flee the area.
Ko Ni had previously
criticized religious laws pushed by Buddhist nationalists.
Myanmar’s border regions
have simmered for decades with ethnic minority insurgencies but it is rare for
prominent political figures to be murdered in Yangon, the country’s booming and
largely safe commercial hub.
However, in recent years
Myanmar has witnessed a surge of anti-Muslim sentiment, fanned by hard-line
Buddhist nationalists.
Around 5 percent of
Myanmar’s population is Muslim.
Suu Kyi has herself faced
criticism for not fielding a single Muslim candidate during the 2015 elections,
a move which analysts said was a sop to Buddhist hard-liners.
She has also faced
international censure for her failure to criticize the crackdown on the
Rohingya in Rakhine.
Since its launch in October
at least 66,000 Rohingya have fled to neighboring Bangladesh, alleging security
forces are carrying out a campaign of rape, torture and mass killings.
Suu Kyi and the military
have denied allegations of abuse.
The office of Myanmar’s
powerful army chief said the military would offer its full support in the probe
into the shooting.
“As this tragedy could
seriously harm security, the army will cooperate with security organizations to
arrest any culprits soonest and reveal the truth,” a statement said.
The International Crisis
Group, a think-tank that has previously sounded the alarm over rising religious
intolerance in Myanmar, said the killing “underlines the urgency of the Myanmar
government and society coming together to condemn all forms of hate speech.”