Tens of thousands of people have turned out in Myanmar in one of the biggest days of protest against last month’s coup despite overnight raids by security forces in the main city Yangon.
Police fired tear gas and stun grenades in Lashio town in the country’s northern Shan region, according to live video posted on Facebook on Sunday.
A witness said police opened fire to break up a protest in the historic temple town of Bagan but it was not clear if they were using rubber bullets or live ammunition.
There were no immediate reports of casualties. Protests in half a dozen other cities were peaceful.
The biggest turnout was in Myanmar’s second city, Mandalay, where activists staged a sit-in protest after two minutes of silence in honour of people killed by police and the army, video showed.
The United Nations says security forces have killed over 50 people to stamp out demonstrations and strikes in the Southeast Asian nation since the military overthrew and detained Aung San Suu Kyi on 1 February.
“They are killing people just like killing birds and chickens,” one protest leader said to the crowd in Dawei, in the country’s south.
“What will we do if we don’t revolt against them? We must revolt.”
Protests were also held in at least three places in Yangon, where residents said soldiers and police moved into several districts overnight, firing shots.
They arrested at least three in Kyauktada township, residents there said. They did not know the reason for the arrests.
Soldiers also came looking for a lawyer who worked for Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy but were unable to find him, a member of the now-dissolved parliament, Sithu Maung, said in a Facebook post.
Well over 1,700 people have been detained under the junta by Saturday, according to figures from the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners advocacy group.
“Detainees were punched and kicked with military boots, beaten with police batons and then dragged into police vehicles,” AAPP said in a statement.
“Security forces entered residential areas and tried to arrest further protesters, and shot at the homes, destroying many.”
Myanmar authorities said on Saturday they had exhumed the body of 19-year-old Kyal Sin, who has become an icon of the protest movement after she was shot dead in Mandalay on Wednesday wearing a T-shirt that read “Everything will be OK”.
State-run MRTV said a surgical investigation showed she could not have been killed by police because the wrong projectile was found in her head and she had been shot from behind, whereas police were in front.
Photographs on the day showed her head turned away from security forces moments before she was killed. Opponents of the coup accused authorities of an attempted cover-up.
The killings have drawn anger in the West and have been condemned by most democracies in Asia.
The United States and some other Western countries have imposed limited sanctions. China, meanwhile, has said the priority should be stability and that other countries should not interfere.
