Suu Kyi to be freed

Yangon: Democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi will be released just days after Myanmar's first election in two decades, said officials on Thursday.

The Nobel Peace laureate, who has been under detention for most of the last twenty years since winning the country's last general election, will be freed when her current term of house arrest expires on November 13, said the unnamed sources.

“November will be an important and busy month for us because of the election and because of Aung San Suu Kyi's release,” a Myanmar official told AFP, noting the release would come soon after the country's November 7 poll.

A second Myanmar official, who also declined to be named, confirmed the release date, adding “she will be released on that day according to the law”.

Neither Ms. Suu Kyi nor her National League for Democracy (NLD) party will participate in the first poll since their 1990 victory and the vote has been dismissed as a sham aimed at hiding military power behind a civilian facade.

Ms. Suu Kyi was initially sentenced to three years in jail and hard labour last year after a bizarre incident in May in which American John Yettaw swam to her lakeside house. At first she was held at Myanmar's feared Insein prison but was allowed to return to her crumbling family mansion in August 2009 after her sentence was commuted to one-and-a-half years house arrest by junta leader Than Shwe. — AFP