Junta gang hits Suu Kyi birthday rally

Pro-junta thugs broke up a rally by supporters of Myanmar democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi yesterday, detaining several members of the crowd chanting for her release on her 63rd birthday, a senior opposition member said.

At least six truckloads of Swan-Arr-Shin, or "Masters of Force", gang members waded into the crowd outside the dilapidated headquarters of Ms Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) in the former capital, Yangon, one witness said.

"We saw some of them slapping and beating NLD members," the witness said.

Senior NLD official Win Naing later told Reuters three people had been taken away, but other witnesses said as many as 13 people were detained.

Police cordoned off roads leading to the rally where the NLD members had shouted slogans demanding freedom for Ms Suu Kyi and more than 1,300 political prisoners believed to be behind bars in the former Burma.

Ms Suu Kyi's confinement in her lakeside home in Yangon was extended in May despite international pleas to the generals to end her latest stretch of detention, which began in May 2003.

The Nobel peace laureate has now been confined for nearly 13 of the past 19 years, with her telephone line cut and all visitors barred apart from her cook and occasionally her doctor.

Her birthday has become an annual ritual inside and outside Myanmar for campaigners seeking an end to the 46 years of military rule that have reduced a once-promising economy and country to an impoverished international pariah.