A Myanmar air force jet bombed a monastery compound in Swel Le Oh village, in Myaung township about 75 kilometres west of Mandalay, on Friday, killing 14 people and wounding 20. More than 100 people were staying in and around the monastery for a week-long meditation retreat marking Buddhist Lent.
The death toll was given by Nway Oo, a spokesman for the Civil Defence and Security Organisation of Myaung Township, an anti-government body, and reported on Saturday. Three of those killed were women. Those who died were aged between 50 and 70, most of them older people who had entered the meditation centre for a three month period.
A villager who described the attack said the jet dropped two bombs 15 minutes apart, and that the second damaged a house near the monastery where retreat participants had gathered after the first.
The military has not commented on this strike. Its standing position is that it attacks only legitimate targets of war, and it describes the armed groups opposing it as terrorists. That description is the military government's own, and it covers a range of forces from local defence units to established ethnic armed organisations.
Myaung township sits in Sagaing region, one of the strongest centres of armed resistance to the military government since it took power. The casualty figures in Sagaing are almost always produced by resistance-aligned local bodies or by residents, because independent access to the area is restricted and the military does not publish its own counts. That is the condition under which this figure has been reported, and it has not been independently verified.
The Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, established by the United Nations Human Rights Council, said in August that it had observed a notable escalation in aerial attacks in the period before the elections held in December and January, and that the attacks have continued at the same rate since. A separate United Nations report has recorded the military increasingly using low-cost aircraft, including motorised paragliders and gyrocopters, in attacks that frequently kill civilians.
Those elections were held while the military remained in control of the state and while much of Sagaing and neighbouring regions sat outside its administration. The air campaign has continued under the government formed from them.
No party has announced an investigation into the Myaung strike. The military government has not responded to the account given by the township body, and the retreat at Swel Le Oh had been due to run for another several days.
