Two Reuters reporters were handed secret police documents at what they thought was a routine dinner, then arrested for possessing them. The massacre those documents helped expose sent seven soldiers to prison for ten years. The soldiers were free within months. The journalists were not.
Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, both reporters for Reuters in Myanmar, were invited to dinner at a restaurant on the outskirts of Yangon on the evening of December 12, 2017, by police officers they knew from their reporting. The officers handed them documents over the meal. Police arrested both journalists immediately afterward, charging them under the country's colonial-era Official Secrets Act for possessing classified material, a charge carrying a maximum sentence of fourteen years. Police initially told the public the arrest had taken place elsewhere, on the city's outskirts, rather than describing the restaurant meeting that had actually preceded it.
The documents at the center of the case were connected to the reporters' investigation into the killing of ten Rohingya men and boys in the village of Inn Din, in Myanmar's Rakhine State, in early September 2017. Their reporting, eventually published by Reuters in February 2018, named the men killed, ranging in age from seventeen to forty five, among them fishermen, an Islamic teacher, and two students, and documented how Myanmar soldiers and local Rakhine residents had killed them and buried them in a mass grave. Seven Myanmar soldiers were convicted of murder in connection with the killings and sentenced to ten years each with hard labor. All seven were released within a year, in November 2018, having served roughly one tenth of the sentence handed down against the two reporters who had exposed what they did.
The clearest evidence that the arrest had been engineered came from inside the police force itself. A police captain named Moe Yan Naing testified in April 2018 that he and fellow officers had been ordered to hand the journalists documents specifically so they could be arrested for possessing them, and that a senior officer had threatened subordinates with imprisonment if they refused to carry out the plan. He testified further, weeks later, that a police brigadier general had personally orchestrated the operation. The consequences for speaking up arrived almost immediately: his family was evicted from their police housing the day after his first day of testimony, and he himself was sentenced to a year in prison under the force's internal disciplinary code for having spoken to the press about the case at all.
An appeal to a lower appellate court failed in January 2019, and Myanmar's Supreme Court rejected a final appeal on April 23, 2019. It took a presidential intervention to end the case. On May 7, 2019, President Win Myint granted the two journalists amnesty as part of a broader prisoner release, and they walked free after more than five hundred days in custody. Aung San Suu Kyi, then serving as State Counsellor and widely criticized internationally for her defense of the prosecution, had told an audience the previous September that "if we believe in the rule of law, they have every right to appeal the judgment and to point out why the judgment was wrong, if they consider it wrong," a statement that stopped well short of acknowledging any flaw in the case against them herself.
The soldiers convicted of the massacre served less time in prison than the reporters who told the world it happened.
The two journalists received the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for the investigation that had led to their imprisonment, one of the rare instances of a Pulitzer being awarded for work whose authors were still, at the time of the reporting itself, sitting in a Yangon prison. The Committee to Protect Journalists marked their release by saying it was "deeply relieved" and adding a hope that it would "herald a new era of press freedom in Myanmar, where reporters no longer fear reprisal merely for doing their jobs."
That hope did not survive the decade. Myanmar's military seized power in a coup in February 2021, and the country's press freedom environment, already constrained during the period of Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo's prosecution, deteriorated substantially further afterward. Global press freedom monitors have since repeatedly ranked Myanmar among the world's leading jailers of journalists, a distinction the country now shares, according to annual prison census reporting from the Committee to Protect Journalists, with a small group of states that includes China. The specific case that first drew the world's attention to how Myanmar's security services could manufacture a prosecution against inconvenient reporters has, in that sense, become less an exception in the country's recent history than an early example of a pattern that has only grown more entrenched since.
The reporting that put Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo in prison identified the ten Rohingya victims of the Inn Din killing by name and age, a level of specificity that made the massacre far harder for Myanmar's military to dismiss as unverified rumor once the story ran. That specificity is also, in the account both journalists and press freedom groups have given since, precisely what made them targets: a vague accusation of atrocity is easy for a government to deny, a documented one with named victims and a mass grave is not. International reaction to their conviction was swift and largely unified, with press freedom organizations across Asia and beyond describing the case as a template for how governments could criminalize the reporting of an atrocity by prosecuting the reporters rather than answering for the killing itself, a template that has since been echoed, with local variations, in several of the other cases gathered in this series.