Another villager named U D---, was seized by a group of people then punched and beaten until he was unconscious. They thought that he was dead so they left him on the ground. He was hospitalised that night.   

A male A--- villager retold what happened to him:

“They came to my house and I stepped out in front of my yard because I was worried that a student girl who was sleeping [in my house] would wake up and get scared of the situation. They shouted: ‘Is there anyone inside the house?’ I replied ‘yes’ and they said: ‘We don’t care if people are inside [the house].’ Then they kicked me in the chest and I fell down. They punched me one [time] in each side, and they kicked me twice in the back. Then they told me: ‘You cannot live here anymore. You have to leave immediately.’ I told them that I have nowhere else to go and I begged them to let me stay one more night, and they did not do anything else to me.”

According to that male A--- villager, the invaders dragged a woman who ran a shop beside his house, and her three children from their beds and ordered them out of the shop. Then, they destroyed the shop and took various food items, and ordered the woman and her children to leave the place immediately. The woman’s husband was not at home that night and she and her children did not have a place to move to, so they stayed the night at the old Wa Da Kwin monastery.

Maung K---, a witness to the attack in A---, repeated what Pe Thi and Nga Myo had told their people prior to the incident: “If you still see people from this section [area] in the morning, do not keep any of them alive at night…. do not keep any of them in this section. This section does not belong to them. This section belongs to Wa Da Kwin village.”

Villagers noted that every time they came they threatened villagers with these words.

A female villager stated that, “We requested them [Wa Da Kwin villagers] to meet with any leaders from the government office. In this open [official] situation, charge us if we were wrong but [give] notice [to] us. If it is true that they own the land and we trespassed on their land, they should have done it [asking the A--- residents to leave] in the meaningful [right] way. Right now, they did a meaningless thing and they did it at night time, so are they rebels or robbers? ”

On February 1st 2016 at 8:20 pm, a group of people with one full truck and 13 motorbikes, all wearing military uniforms, came and burnt down the villagers’ houses. According to villagers, the attackers took a break for a while, then they started burning the houses again at 2 am and they finished burning all the houses at 4 am, February 2nd 2016. They burned 650 houses in total and there were 350 of these houses where the owners and their family members were there [when the incident happened]. For other houses, the owners were not there because their children are studying in town so they have not moved to the place [A---] yet. They just came and built the houses first. The invaders went back to Zi Pyaung road. When they came, they brought iron rods, sharp bamboo sticks, long blade knives and slingshots.

While the incident happened, villagers contacted and requested help from both local Tatmadaw and Burma/Myanmar government police but they said that they cannot help with the case. Villagers reported: “We phoned the Tatmadaw last night, and they replied: ‘We don’t have authority to do anything and we cannot go.’ We phoned the police and they also replied: ‘We cannot go.’”

However, after a group of women from A--- went to the Tatmadaw army camp at Light Infantry Battalion (LIB) #207 and begged them to help these villagers who houses were burning down, around 20 Tatmadaw soldiers went to the incident place. At that time all the attackers had already left. 

According to villagers from A---, they ran with their children to a nearby forest to escape the attack and left all their belongings behind. They noted that three male villagers sustained serious injuries during the first attack and many sustained minor injuries. One elderly woman died while she was running and one man was hospitalised at Bago Hospital after he was beaten. Almost all villagers’ properties were set on fire, while some items were stolen, and some villagers’ money was confiscated by the assailants.

On the next day, February 2nd 2016, after the villagers’ houses had been burnt down, villagers brought the case to the Burma/Myanmar government police station in Thein Zayat Town, and the police officer at Thein Zayat Police Station submitted the case to Kyaikto Police Station in Kyaikto Town. They made an appointment to meet on February 16th 2016, however, when KHRG followed up with a community member in May 2016, that meeting never took place and many villagers were still at the local monastery. KHRG has not received further information on how the case is being handled by the Burma/Myanmar police.