5 arrested over mosque burning

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Myanmar police have detained five villagers for burning down a mosque last week, an officer said Tuesday, as authorities look to contain religious violence in the Buddhist-majority nation. Anti-Muslim sentiment has fomented across Myanmar in recent years, sporadically erupting into bloodshed and threatening to damage democratic gains in the former junta-run country.

In the past two weeks, Buddhist mobs have ransacked two mosques in separate towns, sending Muslim residents fleeing to other villages for safety. Myanmar’s state security forces, which are overwhelmingly Buddhist, have faced criticism for slow or incomplete investigations into previous acts of religious violence. But on Tuesday they said they had arrested five people linked to the attack on a mosque in northern Kachin State last Friday. “We have arrested four men and a woman.

They (were part of the group) who destroyed the mosque,” Moe Lwin, a police officer from Lone Khin, the affected village, told AFP. The group allegedly joined the armed Buddhist mob that stormed the prayer hall and burned it to the ground last week. “It is not very easy to take legal action against all the people concerned with this case as there were many people there on that day,” he added. But no arrests have been made in the central Bago village where another mosque was ransacked last month, according to a local Muslim leader. (AFP)

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