RANGOON — Rangoon’s Southern District Court on Friday handed down the death penalty to a man found guilty of murdering two police officers earlier this year in Thanlyin Township, according to police officer Maung Maung Than, who escorted the accused to trial.
The convicted killer, Tin Myint, stabbed Col. Aung Naing and Cpl. Thura Lwin to death on the outskirts of the commercial capital on Sept. 2.
“The judge sentenced him to hang this morning, I transferred him to Insein Prison [afterward],” Maung Maung Than told The Irrawaddy.
The defendant was found guilty of all three charges brought against him, including Article 302 covering murder, which carries with it a maximum sentence of life imprisonment or death by hanging.
Citing police records, local media reported that Tin Myint was born in Waw Township, Pegu Division, and from a young age ran repeatedly afoul of the law, including a 1990 murder conviction that earned him a life sentence.
He was granted an amnesty in 2008, according to local reports, but found himself behind bars again three years later, convicted of multiple criminal offenses including robbery, theft and attempted rape. Serving a 20-year sentence for those charges, he was again released in a 2014 amnesty.
Though capital punishment remains on the books in Burma, it is considered “abolished in practice,” according to Amnesty International, with no known executions having taken place since 1988.
According to Amnesty, a total of 55 death sentences were nonetheless handed down by Burmese courts from 2007-2014. President Thein Sein in January 2014 commuted the sentences of all convicted killers on death row to life imprisonment or lesser prison terms.
One man has received the death penalty since the blanket commutation, according to Myat Soe, a police officer with the Southern District Police’s criminal department, who said the sentence was meted out over the brutal slaughter last year of a woman in Rangoon’s Twantay Township.
