YANGON: Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi received a package from Britain’s King Charles on Monday (Oct 19), authorities said, releasing the first pictures of the detained Nobel laureate in two months and describing her as a “special female prisoner”.
It is the first time Myanmar authorities have used the term to describe Aung San Suu Kyi, who was deposed in a military coup in 2021, triggering an ongoing civil war that has killed more than 100,000 people, according to monitor ACLED.
The coup leader and former military chief Min Aung Hlaing was installed as civilian president in April following elections that did not include Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, and she was moved to house arrest soon afterwards.
Home ministry officials met her on Monday to deliver a package of two books about soil, “one sealed envelope, and a sealed diplomatic communication sent by King Charles of the United Kingdom to the special female detainee”, Myanmar’s presidential spokeswoman said on her Facebook page.
Britain is Myanmar’s former colonial power and the monarch is known to have a keen interest in gardening and the environment.
Accompanying the statement were two images of Aung San Suu Kyi meeting two men with their backs to the camera.
The pictures appeared to be in a similar room to the last released images of her, when she met a Red Cross representative in August, her first publicised meeting with a foreign official since her ouster.
Fact-checkers from AFP examined the latest photos and found no evidence of manipulation using Meta Generative AI or OpenAI tools.
