A US man sentenced to seven years’ hard labour for swimming to the home of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi flew out of army-ruled Myanmar on Sunday.
A US man sentenced to seven years’ hard labour for swimming to the home of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi flew out of army-ruled Myanmar on Sunday with an American senator who secured his release.
John Yettaw, 54, was earlier handed over to US embassy officials at Yangon’s notorious Insein prison, after Democrat Jim Webb held landmark talks with the reclusive chief of Myanmar’s military regime, Than Shwe.
The ruling junta however ignored Webb’s calls to free Nobel laureate Suu Kyi, who was this week sentenced to another 18 months of house arrest on charges sparked by Yettaw’s bizarre stunt in May.
The Myanmar regime sparked international outrage by extending Suu Kyi’s detention, which will keep the 64-year-old locked up during elections promised by the generals in 2010.
“I express my thanks to the government of Myanmar,” Webb said at Yangon airport, shortly before the military plane carrying him and Yettaw departed for Bangkok, Thailand. “I am not going to apologise for the actions that he took but I believe that it was a good gesture from your government to our country to allow him to return home to his family for humanitarian reasons,” he added.
The senator, who has close links to US president Obama, also said that his meetings with opposition politicians and ethnic groups had helped him “better understand the issues that we need to be working on in the future”.
Myanmar officials said the regime was deporting Yettaw, adding, “His sentence has been reduced to three-and-a-half years and then made a suspended sentence.”
Yettaw, a diabetic and epileptic former military veteran, was arrested on May 6 after using a pair of home-made flippers to swim across a lake from Suu Kyi’s crumbling mansion, where he had spent two days uninvited.
The devout Mormon said at his trial that he was on a “mission from God” to warn Suu Kyi that he had had a vision in which she was assassinated by terrorists. Her lawyers earlier described the father-of-seven as a “fool”.
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