YANGON (AFP): A Myanmar ethnic armed group sentenced a man to death for murder following a public trial in a town recently captured from the junta, media affiliated to the group reported.
Officials from the United Wa State Army (UWSA) sentenced the man for murdering an eight-year-old girl, Wa News Land said on Wednesday.
The girl was killed in August during a robbery at a grocery shop in the town of Hopang, in Shan state, and the authorities arrested the man two months later, the post said.
The UWSA is the best-equipped of Myanmar's dozen or so ethnic armed groups and has close ties to China, which analysts say supplies much of its weaponry.
It runs a semi-autonomous enclave on the border with China's Yunnan province which uses China's yuan currency and gets its electricity and internet from Chinese providers.
The group took control of Hopang in January after an allied ethnic armed group captured the territory from the military and handed it over.
At the public trial in a "cultural park" in the town six others were sentenced to life imprisonment or lengthy jail terms, Wa News Land said without specifying their crimes.
"The death penalty is imposed but we would not execute him in public," a judicial official told the outlet.
Many of Myanmar's ethnic armed groups run parallel legal systems in territory they hold along the country's borders.
In April, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) executed three of its personnel for murder and for selling weapons and ammunition stolen from the group.
