A military strike hit a group of people gathered in Chaung U township in central Myanmar on Monday evening to mark the Thadingyut full moon festival and to demonstrate against the military junta that rules the country.
The attack killed at least 20 people, according to a Reuters report citing an eyewitness, human rights group Amnesty International, as well as members of the shadow government of national unity and an armed resistance group in the area. An organizer of the event told Agence France-Presse that 40 people were killed, including children, while 80 others were injured.
Screams for help could be heard in a video taken the night after the attack, which also showed a burning fire. Another video, recorded in broad daylight, shows a destroyed building and a young man who said he was collecting body parts following the attack.
Hundreds of people had gathered for the event when the bombs struck after 7 p.m., a member of the event’s organizing committee said. She was not present at the scene, but she attended the funeral on Tuesday.
“The committee alerted people and a third of the crowd managed to flee,” she explained to AFP. “But immediately, a motorized paraglider flew over the crowd,” dropping two bombs in the middle of the gathering.
“The kids were completely torn,” she said.
Paramotors, or powered paragliders, are used by one or two soldiers to drop explosives, fire weapons or conduct low-altitude surveillance, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. The junta expanded their use this year, the group said.
Amnesty International said Myanmar’s ruling junta is taking advantage of reduced international oversight “to commit war crimes with impunity.”
“As the military attempts to consolidate its power through organized elections later this year, it is escalating an already brutal campaign against pockets of resistance,” Joe Freeman, Myanmar researcher for Amnesty International, said in a statement.
Myanmar’s military leaders, who have ruled the country since a 2021 coup that toppled the last elected government and sparked a brutal civil war against rebel groups, have framed the upcoming elections, scheduled for Dec. 28, as a point of transition. Critics say the elections are a sham aimed at keeping the army in power.
Before its closure in May, RFA’s Burmese service reported daily a sustained rate of bomb attacks perpetrated by the junta. The service’s latest English-language stories include bombings of a rebel-controlled village in western Myanmar that killed more than a dozen people; a school in central Myanmar, killing at least 20 students; four insurgent-controlled villages in northern Myanmar; and a strike on villages in southeastern Myanmar that destroyed a hospital and forced 8,000 people to flee their homes.
Includes reporting from Agence France-Presse and Reuters.