This article is by Shawn W. Crispin, CPJ Senior Southeast Asia Representative. Here is an excerpt from CPJ.

One year since a democracy-suspending coup, press freedom is dying in Myanmar. A military campaign of intimidation, censorship, arrests, and detentions of journalists has more recently graduated to outright killing, an escalation of repression that aims ultimately to stop independent media reporting on the junta’s crimes and abuses.

In January, military authorities abducted local news reporter Pu Tuidim shortly after he interviewed members of the anti-coup Chinland Defense Force armed group in the restive Chin State. Soldiers confiscated his laptop computer, used him as a captive human shield in a live-fire combat zone, and then summarily executed him, dumping his bound corpse in the muddy outskirts of a local village, his editor at the Khonumthung Media Group told CPJ.  

Pu Tuidim’s murder followed the killing of two other Myanmar journalists in December, including one independent photographer who was picked up for photographing an anti-coup silent protest in the commercial capital of Yangon, held at a military interrogation center, and then pronounced by a military hospital as dead without explanation to his family.

Read the full article here.