A man convicted of the September murder of two policemen was sentenced to death by hanging at Rangoon’s Thanlyin Township court on Friday.
Tin Myint, 47, had been released in three separate presidential amnesties, most recently in July this year. His latest release came despite committing violent crimes including a sexual assault after his first release in 2008 and the murder of a Pegu police officer after his second release in 2014.
Maung Maung Than, a police superintendent who attended Thursday’s trial, told DVB that Tin Myint was sentenced under two articles of the Penal Code.
“[Tin Myint] was sentenced to death under Article 302 (1) (b), for murder, and three years imprisonment under Article 332, for causing grievous harm to a civil servant,” he said.
On release from a second presidential amnesty in 2014, Tin Myint stabbed to death a man in Thanlyin Township. In September 2015, he committed the final two stabbing murders – this time of police officers Col. Aung Naing and Cpl. Thura Lwin. The officers had arrived at a guesthouse to place him under arrest.
His first murder on record occurred in 1990 in Mingalar Taungnyunt, Rangoon, when he stabbed a man to death while committing a robbery. He fled the scene to Pegu, where he stabbed a local policeman who was attempting to arrest him while on the run in Waw, the town in which he was born. The policeman died.
Following the stabbings, he returned to Rangoon where he was eventually apprehended by authorities at his then-wife’s home.
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Tin Myint was first sentenced to life imprisonment in Pegu for the murder of the Waw police officer, before being transported back to Rangoon to stand trial at the local township court for the robbery and murder in Mingalar Taungnyunt. During his transfer to Rangoon, he escaped after assaulting the court escort, and remained on the run for a period of that day, before he was apprehended and sentenced to 10 year term of imprisonment.
Under the first 2008 prisoner amnesty ordered by President Thein Sein, Tin Myint was released and married for a second time. The following year, he was charged for the rape of his step-daughter. He fled the charge, and committed three counts of theft each in Thingangyun, Mingalar Taungnyunt and Tamwe townships.
In 2011 he was eventually arrested again in South Dagon Township for weapon possession, and cumulatively sentenced to more than 20 years in prison. During the sentence, he attempted escape, attracting an additional four months to his term, before being released in the 2014 amnesty.
Capital punishment is all but abolished in Burma, with Amnesty International recording no known executions since 1989, with the exception of one death penalty upheld last year. The NGO reports that 55 death penalties were handed down between 2007 – 2014, however President Thein Sein commuted the sentences to life imprisonment or lesser terms, in 2014.
