A Myanmar military operation that used a motorised paraglider to drop bombs on a village this week killed at least 20 people including children and injured dozens more, according to witnesses and local media.
The attack hit Chaung U, in Sagaing region, during a national holiday. Myanmar has been engulfed in armed conflict since the military seized power in 2021 and the village has been a key battleground in the war.
“I saw body parts [scattered] everywhere,” a resident told the Democratic Voice of Burma news service. Witnesses said it was hard to distinguish civilians from anti-junta fighters among those killed.
The bombs were dropped from a paraglider fitted with a small engine, a low-tech and cheap weapon of a type that the Myanmar junta has increasingly deployed this year to intensify its aerial campaign against those opposing it.
The victims were holding a sit-in protest against the military regime during a ceremony to celebrate the Thadingyut festival, the country’s biggest Buddhist holiday.
A local resident who attended Monday’s ceremony told the Associated Press that people began to flee after hearing reports of an approaching paraglider but it arrived sooner than expected. The paraglider returned later the same evening to drop more explosives.
Footage of the crowd’s desperate scramble to help the wounded and locate missing loved ones circulated on social media.
Amnesty International said the attack underscored the need to protect Myanmar residents. “The international community may have forgotten about the conflict in Myanmar, but the Myanmar military is taking advantage of reduced scrutiny to carry out war crimes with impunity,” said Joe Freeman, Amnesty’s Myanmar researcher.
The military has not acknowledged carrying out an attack in the area.
Myanmar’s generals have been fighting a civil war that erupted after they seized power in February 2021 from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. Much of the country, including the village where the attack took place, is under the control of armed opposition groups.
The junta has declared elections for 28 December but a UN expert has dismissed the plan as a “fraud”. Anti-junta opposition groups are barred from running or are refusing to take part.
Last month UN investigators released a report saying that the “frequency and brutality” of atrocities inside the country had continued to escalate, more than four years after the coup.
The investigators said they had gathered significant evidence that there was systematic torture inside prison facilities, including beatings, electric shocks, strangulation, torture by pulling out fingernails with pliers, and forms of sexual violence, including rape and gang-rape.
