MASSACRE OF BUDDHIST MONKS IN BURMA

Very, very disturbing news from Australia's Herald Sun about Burma or Myanmar - here quoted:

"October 02, 2007 12:00am
A SENIOR Burmese intelligence official claims thousands of protesters are dead and the bodies of hundreds of executed monks have been dumped in the jungle.

After defecting from the military junta and fleeing to the Thai border, Hla Win told a reporter from London's Daily Mail: "Many more people have been killed in recent days than you've heard about. The bodies can be counted in several thousand."

The horrific details emerged as Burma's top general continued to snub the UN's peace envoy, who is in Rangoon on a mission to convey the world's outrage to the junta.

With protests quashed and many monasteries empty, fears are growing for those who have disappeared into Burma's grim jails.

Observers say many detainees have been taken to the city's notorious Insein prison, the Government Technological Institute, the police battalion number seven compound, the Kyaikkasan racetrack and possibly elsewhere.

Mr Win said he fled when he was ordered to help massacre holy men.

Other exiles along the frontier confirmed that hundreds of monks had simply "disappeared".

Pro-democracy campaigners inside Burma yesterday released a graphic video showing the semi-naked body of a badly bruised monk, floating face down in a Rangoon river.

Mr Win, 42, a former chief of military intelligence in Rangoon's northern region, said: "I decided to desert when I was ordered to raid two monasteries and force several hundred monks on to trucks.

"They were to be killed and their bodies dumped deep inside the jungle. I refused to participate in this," he said.

Dissidents hiding along the Burma border said thousands of monks had been locked up and were being beaten inside blood stained temples."

Above Photo of Dead Monk, courtesy of Democratic Voice of Burma and BBC