Release of US prisoner in Myanmar

အင္းစိန္ေထာင္တြင္း ေထာင္ဒဏ္ ခုႏွစ္ ႏွစ္အျပစ္ေပးခံရသည္ ့ယက္ေတာမွ ခုႏွစ္ရက္ပင္ မေနရပဲ မနက္ျဖန္တြင္ ဗီယက္နမ္စစ္ျပန္ လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္ ဂ်င္၀ဘ္ ႏွင့္ အတူ ျပည္ေတာ္ ျပန္လြတ္ေျမာက္
ေတာ့ မည္ျဖစ္သည္။

စစ္အစိုးရေခါင္းေဆာင္ ပိုင္းက လူသားခ်င္းစာနာ ေထာက္ထားမႈ ႏွင့္ သူ၏က်န္းမာေရးကို အေၾကာင္းျပဳၿပီး ေနရင္းႏိုင္ငံသို ့ျပန္ပို ့ရန္ ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရ က ဆံုးျဖတ္ခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္ဟု အေမရိကန္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးသမား ဂ်္၀ဘ္ ကသူ ၏ ၀ဘ္ ဆိုက္တြင္ေဖၚျပထား သည္။

တားျမစ္ဧရိယာအတြင္း ေရကူးခဲ့မႈႏွင့္ လူဝင္မႈၾကီးၾကပ္ေရး ဥပေဒမ်ားအရ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၏ ေနအိမ္အတြင္း တရားမဝင္ ဝင္ေရာက္ခဲ့သည့္ မစၥတာ ယက္ေတာအား အလုပ္ၾကမ္းႏွင့္ ေထာင္ဒဏ္ ၇ ႏွစ္ က်ခံရန္ တရား႐ံုးက ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ အဂၤါေန႔တြင္ စီရင္ခ်က္ခ်ခဲ့သည္။

YANGON, Myanmar — U.S. Sen. Jim Webb won the release Saturday of an American prisoner convicted in Myanmar and sentenced to seven years in prison for swimming secretly to the residence of detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the senator’s office said.

Yettaw, 53, is to be officially deported Sunday, when he will fly with Webb on a military aircraft to Bangkok, according to a statement from Webb’s office.

Before his conviction on Tuesday, Yettaw had spent several days in a prison hospital for epileptic seizures. He is also said to suffer from asthma and diabetes.

During hi visit to Myanmar — the first by a member of the U.S. Congress in more than a decade — the senator also secured a rare visit with Suu Kyi, who was convicted along with Yettaw and sentenced to 18 more months of house arrest.

The junta’s approval to meet with Suu Kyi may have been given to mitigate the torrent of international criticism against Myanmar following her trial and Tuesday’s verdict. In July, authorities barred U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon from meeting with Suu Kyi during a two-day visit.

Webb, the statement said, requested that Suu Kyi be released from her detention during a meeting with junta leader Senior Gen.Than Shwe Saturday. It was the first time the reclusive general had met with a senior US official.

“It is my hope that we can take advantage of these gestures as a way to begin laying the foundations of goodwill and confidence building in the future,” Webb was quoted as saying.

His visit has drawn criticism from activists who say it confers legitimacy on a brutal regime. Webb is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s East Asia and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee.