Yangon: Myanmar’s military staged a coup on Monday, detaining democratically elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and declaring it had taken control of the country for one year under a state of emergency.
The intervention followed weeks of rising tensions between the military, which ruled the country for nearly five decades, and the civilian government over elections in November last year that Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party won easily.
Suu Kyi and President Win Myint were detained in the capital, Naypyidaw, before dawn, party spokesman Myo Nyunt told AFP, just hours before parliament was meant to reconvene for the first time since the elections.
“We heard they were taken by the military… with the situation we see happening now, we have to assume that the military is staging a coup,” he said.
The military then declared, via its own television channel, a one-year state of emergency and announced that former general Myint Swe would be acting president…