Three men dead as regime soldiers open fire on villages in Gangaw 

Regime forces shot three people dead in Magwe Region’s Gangaw Township and set houses on fire at random during raids on three villages on Friday afternoon.

The crackdown on villagers was unleashed after military trucks passing through the township were struck by explosives on the same day.

One of the victims was Saw Min Hlaing Oo, a 33-year-old primary school teacher participating in the nationwide general strike against the coup regime; he was shot in the waist and the thigh. The two other casualties were men aged 50 and 33, but whose names were not known at the time of reporting.

A Gangaw local said he did not know why the houses—three in total—were burned down.

“Soldiers opened fire, aiming at the villages from a road. Many bullets landed in my village,” a local man told Myanmar Now, asking not to mention the names of the targeted villages out of fear of reprisal. “Bullets passed just over the heads of some people who were running from the gunshots. The whole village had to run.”

One woman was injured by a gunshot wound to the arm, and a woman in her 70s slipped down a hillside and broke one of her legs while fleeing the regime forces’ attack, the local added.

Villagers reportedly returned to their houses at around 5:30pm after the soldiers had left.

Residents of southern Sagaing Region’s Kani and Yinmabin townships, which border Magwe Region, have been resisting the junta rule with homemade guns and explosives since April.

In retaliation, the military raided several villages in those areas to crush the locals’ armed resistance, forcing more than 15,000 residents to flee to the forests to hide or to seek refuge in other towns.