BANGKOK/MELBOURNE:
Sean Turnell, an Australian financial adviser to Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, mentioned in a message to Reuters on Saturday he was getting detained, days just after she was overthrown in a coup.
“I guess you will soon hear of it, but I am being detained,” he mentioned.
“Being charged with something, but not sure what. I am fine and strong, and not guilty of anything,” he mentioned, with a smile emoji.
It was not subsequently doable to make contact with him.
This is the very first identified arrest of a foreign national in Myanmar considering the fact that the army generals seized energy alleging fraud in a Nov. 8 election that Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won in a landslide.
Australia’s foreign ministry was not instantly obtainable to comment.
Turnell is a professor of economics at Macquarie University in Sydney and has been advising Suu Kyi on financial policy for quite a few years.
On Saturday, quite a few thousand protesters gathered in Australia’s second-biggest city of Melbourne denouncing the coup and demanding the release of Suu Kyi.
Television and social media footage showed men and women wearing the red colour of the NLD, carrying portraits of Suu Kyi and singing “We Won’t Be Satisfied Until The End Of The World”, the Burmese language anthem from the country’s 1988 pro-democracy uprising, brutally place down by the military government.
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