Early on January 20, Nang Seng realized something was amiss. That morning, the children had passed in front of her home, as usual, but not the two young women teaching at the village school.
The ethnic Kachin teachers — Maran Lu Ra, 20, and Tangbau Hkawn Nan Tsin, 21 — had been living in the village since May 2014, sent as volunteers by the Kachin Baptist Convention. When she looked across at the teachers’ home, she noticed there was no smoke coming from the hut.
Nang Seng, a 39-year-old laywoman who looks after the local Baptist church here in Kaung Kha village, wandered over to the doorstep.
“I pushed the door and it gave easily,” she said. “The room was open.”
She doesn’t remember stumbling out of the hut — just her own screams.
“The next thing I knew, I was screaming for the whole village to come,” she recalled.
In a video of the immediate aftermath seen by ucanews.com, the two women’s bloody and battered bodies are seen laying side by side on a bamboo bed, their pajamas pulled down. Around them lie the accoutrements you might expect — an orange teddy bear, pictures drawn by young students. The handheld camera zooms in on the walls, showing splashes of red. The image pans to a bloodied piece of firewood discarded next to the bodies.
The murders set off an outpouring of grief in ethnic Kachin communities from Yangon to Myitkyina. The tragedy has become yet another of the swirling recriminations that make peace in the four-year old war in Kachin and northern Shan states — involving the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and a number of other rebel groups — seem as distant as ever.
Nearly two months later, the case remains unsolved. Many are questioning the police’s commitment to finding the perpetrators. Although only circumstantial evidence has so far been put forward, most in this community in northern Shan state believe that the answer lies with a group of Myanmar army soldiers positioned in the village at the time.
“He seemed to be nervous and afraid. He was asking me the same questions over and over. When he handed me a cup of tea, his hand was shaking.”
Zau Ra, general secretary of Kachin Baptist Convention’s Mone Maung zone, who is closely monitoring the police investigation, said the doctor who conducted the autopsies concluded that both women had been raped before they were killed.
“They both had the same wounds. This suggests it was systematic,” Zau Ra said. “So we presume that one person arranged this, but that there was a group of attackers. It’s a small room, but the books and things weren’t disturbed. It looked like their hands had been tied and the neighbors heard only muffled screams.”
The Myanmar army stands accused of using rape as a weapon in its wars with ethnic minorities that have for decades taken a hard toll on civilian populations. The Women’s League of Burma, an umbrella organization for women’s groups in the country, collected more than 100 allegations of rape against Myanmar army soldiers between 2010 and the start of 2014.
Just a few hours away from Kaung Kha in the northern Shan town of Kutkai, a soldier was convicted last year of raping a disabled 14-year-old girl and sentenced to 14 years in jail. The case is believed to be the first time a soldier has been tried for rape in a civilian court. But that case remains an outlier — women’s groups say that most rapists in the army go unpunished and many rapes go unreported due to fears of retribution.
The Kachin Baptist Convention has conducted its own partial investigation into the two teachers’ murders, concluding so far only that none of the local villagers are responsible. Zau Ra said more evidence needed to be collected, including from interviews with soldiers, before announcing a definitive conclusion.
The military has publicly issued a threat to local media not to implicate soldiers in the crime, and the police have reportedly dismissed the possibility that troops could be responsible.
It is timing that raises questions about what role army soldiers may have had in the murders. According to villagers, a unit of between 40 and 50 soldiers had arrived in the village the previous morning, January 19. Villagers identified the unit as the Myanmar army’s 503rd Light Infantry Regiment.
The soldiers billeted themselves in four houses. The KIA is active in the area, so it was not unusual for government soldiers to pass through, and villagers said it was common for government troops to demand lodging.
“You can’t really say no,” said Nang Seng, the laywoman who discovered the two teachers’ bodies. “They just say, ‘We need somewhere to rest for a while.’ You just give them some space and they look after themselves.”
A disturbance in the night
Kaung Kha is only a half-hour drive from the bustling Myanmar-China border at Muse, but the mountains — stripped of their timber — deny any horizon and give a sense of remoteness, of being cut off.
Corn, the main crop in the area, fills the lower fields, while quarrying has taken chunks out of many of the hillsides. Many of the people in the village of 200 ethnic Kachin and Chinese households work as day laborers on corn plantations; some go further afield seeking higher wages in China.
Since the teacher’s bodies were discovered, everyone in Kaung Kha has been raking over the events leading up to and following the murders. During a visit in early March, villagers interviewed by ucanews.com offered up observations that many take as proof that the military must be responsible. Other clues lead nowhere, or are contradicted by separate accounts.
On the morning of January 19, the two teachers had taken the village’s children to neighboring Nam Tau village, where they were inoculated against measles and rubella as part of a nationwide campaign. They returned around lunchtime, but school was out for the day, so the two teachers helped Nang Seng in her cornfield.
That night, the teachers attended a birthday party of one of their students. They left at 10pm — the last time they were seen alive.
The teachers’ small hut is separated from most of the homes in the village, being an outbuilding of the church. The nearest house, about 120 feet away, belongs to 58-year-old Hkawn Mai. That night, there were four others staying in the house: a younger couple — distant relatives — and their driver, as well as her 19-year-old son.
At about 1am, Hkawn Mai was woken by her male relative. “He thought he heard some shouting,” she recalled. “I didn’t hear anything. He said the noises had already finished.”
The man was clearly disturbed, though, and insisted that Hkawn Mai join him and his wife to see what the disturbance was.
“I carried a torch. I noticed that the light in the [teachers’] toilet was on. I knocked on the wall and called, ‘teacher! teacher!’ We didn’t hear any response, but I noticed the doorway was a little open,” she said.
“We presumed that the noises came from somewhere else. Here in the hills, sometimes noises travel in strange ways.”
It appears likely that a violent struggle had just taken place in the hut. Somehow, no one was seen, according to Hkawn Mai, and the neighbors went back to bed.
The hut was apparently not disturbed until Nang Seng found the bodies at about 8:30am on January 20. Meanwhile, two military vehicles left the village in the early hours carrying about 10 soldiers, according to multiple villagers’ accounts.
Police did not arrive until midday. By that time, the crime scene had been thoroughly contaminated by amateur crime scene photographers using their mobile phones. In the video footage, when police do arrive, an officer wearing gloves is seen collecting clumps of hair and other samples into small plastic bags, before tying them off.
Before long, local women, who are not wearing gloves, move in to tidy up. During this process, a small yellow-handled kitchen knife is discovered beneath one of the teacher’s bodies. These women rearrange the teachers’ clothes and roll the corpses up in blankets. They are carried out of the hut and into a car amid the wails of distraught locals.
Min Min Soe, the police chief in Muse district, told ucanews.com that semen samples from the bodies, as well as hair taken from villagers and soldiers, had been sent to a lab in the capital, Naypyidaw, for DNA testing. He declined to comment on specifics in the ongoing investigation.
Myanmar Home Affairs Minister Lieutenant General Ko Ko told state television last month that DNA samples were collected from 45 villagers and 28 soldiers. However, residents of Kaung Kha say at least 40 troops were billeted in the village that night.
Villagers claim an army major, who acted suspiciously in the hours after the bodies were discovered, is not among those being tested.
On the night of the murder, the major ordered Kaung Kha’s village chief to accompany one of his soldiers on a reconnaissance trip that took him out of the village for much of the night but served no obvious purpose. Later, the major allegedly told villagers to delete photographs of the crime scene from their cameras. He also refused to be photographed himself.
“I was called in to be interviewed by the army major,” said Daw Bawm Swe, 27, a fellow teacher who attended teacher training with the victims and also works in Kaung Kha village.
“He was asking me what the villagers thought about the soldiers,” she said.
“He seemed to be nervous and afraid. He was asking me the same questions over and over. When he handed me a cup of tea, his hand was shaking.”
“They should investigate and reveal the truth, otherwise trust-building between the government and ethnic people may be far away.”
Accusations and distrust
While many in the Kachin community are convinced that the no one in the village could have committed the murders, an alternative theory has emerged. The police have not publicly advanced the theory, but it has appeared in vaguely sourced local media reports.
The counter-theory goes that Hkawn Mai’s 19-year-old son had amorous intentions toward one of the teachers, but his approaches were spurned. On the night of the murder, the youth and a friend were allegedly taking methamphetamine and, according to this theory, could have committed the killings in tandem.
Hkawn Mai insisted that her son was home in bed at the time. She also denied that he had taken methamphetamine — although that would not be out of the ordinary for a youth in this part of Myanmar. Other Kaung Kha locals also denied that either of the teachers had any romantic involvement with local residents, reciprocated or not.
The two young men were taken into questioning in Muse by police last month, and Hkawn Mai’s son was questioned for 38 hours straight.
The Kachin Baptist Convention issued a statement complaining that threats were used in the interrogation, and asking that police only question villagers with church representatives present. Myanmar authorities are alleged to have widely used torture to extract confessions, including in cases also involving Kachin civilians.
With the police investigation apparently not offering much by way of solutions, hope is pinned on the DNA evidence. But the lack of transparency over who has been tested, and the potential contamination of the crime scene, mean that the case is unlikely to be solved in a way that all sides will find satisfactory.
The Kachin Baptist Convention and a group of women’s organizations have launched their own parallel investigation, overseen by independent lawyers.
One of those lawyers, Mar Khar, said he was concerned that the authorities would keep stalling an investigation for as long as possible to try to diffuse the anger over the case.
He cited the death in military custody last year of journalist Par Gyi. In that case, in southern Myanmar’s Mon state, the government launched an investigation with much fanfare and exhumed the body of the reporter to conduct a postmortem. However, the details of the case have become no clearer.
“If the government has a willingness to solve [the teachers’ murder], they should investigate and reveal the truth, otherwise trust-building between the government and ethnic people may be far away,” Mar Khar said. “It’s time for the government to build trust with the people in ethnic areas by revealing the perpetrators.”
In Kaung Kha, life goes on. During the visit by ucanews.com, the slain teachers’ former students were dressed in academic robes for a graduation ceremony. But the shock has not fully passed, said Nang Seng, whose family has lived in this valley for generations.
“The villagers can’t be sure who did it, but we can be sure that none of the villagers are guilty,” she said. “We can’t accuse [the soldiers]. But it did happen just after they arrived.”
This story was reported by Simon Lewis and John Zaw in Kaung Kha and originally published at www.ucanews.com.
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