YANGON - Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other senior figures from the ruling party have been detained in an early morning raid, the spokesman for the governing National League for Democracy (NLD) said on Monday (Feb 1).
The move comes after days of escalating tension between the civilian government and the powerful military that stirred fears of a coup in the aftermath of an election the army says was fraudulent.
Spokesman Myo Nyunt told Reuters by phone that Ms Suu Kyi, President Win Myint and other leaders had been "taken" in the early hours of the morning.
"With the situation we see happening now, we have to assume that the military is staging a coup," he said.
"I want to tell our people not to respond rashly and I want them to act according to the law," he said, adding he also expected to be detained.
Reuters was subsequently unable to contact him.
Mobile Internet data connections and some phone services were disrupted in Yangon on Monday, residents said.
Myanmar’s national Internet connectivity had fallen to 75 per cent of ordinary levels from 3am local time, Internet monitoring service NetBlocks said.
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State-run MRTV television said in a Facebook post that it was unable to broadcast due to technical issues.
A military spokesman did not answer phone calls seeking comment.
An NLD lawmaker, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, said another of those detained was Mr Han Thar Myint, a member of the party’s central executive committee.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Ms Suu Kyi, 75, came to power after a 2015 landslide election win that followed decades of house arrest in a struggle for democracy that turned her into an international icon.
Her international standing was damaged after hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled army operations into refuge from Myanmar’s western Rakhine state in 2017, but she remains hugely popular at home.
Parliament had been due to start sitting there on Monday after a November election the NLD had won in a landslide, hammering a pro-military party.
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The circumstances of the country’s newly elected MPs were unclear.
Myanmar’s military had said on Sunday it would protect and abide by the Constitution and act according to law after comments earlier in the week had raised fears of a coup.
The military "will do everything possible to adhere to the democratic norms of free and fair elections, as set out by the 2008 Constitution, lasting peace, and inclusive well-being and prosperity for the people of Myanmar," it said in the statement, posted on Facebook.
Myanmar’s election commission has rejected the military’s allegations of vote fraud, saying there were no errors big enough to affect the credibility of the vote.
The Constitution reserves 25 per cent of seats in Parliament for the military and control of three key ministries in Ms Suu Kyi’s administration.
