The Pulitzer-prize winning pair spent more than 500 days in prison before their release on Tuesday.
Two Pulitzer-prize winning journalists were freed from a Myanmar prison on Tuesday, after spending more than a year in prison for reporting on atrocities against the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority.
The two Reuters reporters, 33-year-old Wa Lone and 29-year-old Kyaw Soe Oo, were arrested in December 2017. Myanmar authorities accused them of breaking a colonial-era law that makes it illegal to share secrets with “foreign agents.”
The reporters and their defenders said they were set up, but pair was convicted and was sentenced to seven years in prison.
But on Tuesday, President Win Myint pardoned them, along with approximately 6,000 other prisoners — which is reportedly a tradition around the country’s New Year in mid-April.
Best news ever. Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo have just walked free from Insein Prison in Myanmar after more than 500 days behind bars. What a glorious sight to see your smiles. pic.twitter.com/lQ2aoBvMkS
Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo had been investigating the killing of 10 men who were members of the persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority in a September 2017 military operation in Rakhine State. (They won a Pulitzer prize for their reporting this year.)
But in December of that year, a police officer called Wa Lone and asked him to meet. Wa Lone went, and brought Kyaw Soe Oo with him. According to Reuters:
When it was time to go, Wa Lone later said in court, Naing Lin handed him a copy of the Myanmar Alin, a state-run newspaper, rolled up with some documents inside.
