Troops fire at funeral as Myanmar mourns bloodiest day since coup

Myanmar security forces opened fire at a funeral on Sunday, witnesses said, as people across the country gathered to mourn 114 people killed the previous day in the worst crackdown on protests since the military coup on Feb. 1.

Mourners fled the shooting in Bago at a service for 20-year-old student Thae Maung Maung near the commercial capital Yangon and there were no immediate reports of casualties, three people in the town told Reuters.

“While we are singing the revolution song for him, security forces just arrived and shot at us,” a woman called Aye who was at the service said. “People, including us, run away as they opened fire.”

Three people were killed in other shooting incidents on Sunday and thousands of villagers in a border area fled to Thailand after army air strikes on one of several ethnic militias that have stepped up attacks since the coup, witnesses and local media said.

One person was killed when troops opened fire overnight on a group of protesters near the capital Naypyitaw, Myanmar Now news reported and there were several protests on Sunday in the Sagaing region near the country’s second city, Mandalay.

There were no reports of large-scale protests within Mandalay, which bore the brunt of the casualties on Saturday, Myanmar’s Armed Forces Day, or in Yangon.

At least six children between the ages of 10 and 16 were among those killed on Saturday, according to news reports and witnesses. Protesters call the victims “Fallen Stars”.

Foreign criticism and sanctions imposed by some Western nations have failed so far to sway the military leaders, as have almost daily protests around the country since the junta took power and detained elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

“We salute our heroes who sacrificed lives during this revolution and We Must Win This REVOLUTION,” one of the main protest groups, the General Strike Committee of Nationalities (GSCN), posted on Facebook.

Heavy fighting also erupted between the army and some of the two dozen ethnic armed groups that control swathes of the country.

About 3,000 people fled to neighbouring Thailand after military jets bombed areas controlled by the Karen National Union (KNU) militia near the border in a bombing raid near Thailand, an activist group and local media said.

Saturday’s casualties took the overall number of civilians reported killed since the coup to more than 440.

Countries including the United States, Britain, Germany and the European Union strongly condemned the violence.

The Myanmar military took power saying that November elections won by Suu Kyi’s party were fraudulent, an assertion dismissed by the country’s election commission. Suu Kyi remains in detention at an undisclosed location and many other figures in her party are also in custody.