Australian tells of Myanmar jail squalor, torture fear, An Australian economist who spent nearly two years in a Myanmar prison before being released this week described tortured cellmates’ screams, filthy interrogations, and leg irons. In an interview with The Australian newspaper, Sean Turnell provided the first public information about his imprisonment before being released as part of an amnesty of over 6,000 prisoners on Friday. Shortly after its forces took over the nation in February 2021, the military detained the former adviser to ousted Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Australian tells of Myanmar jail squalor, torture fear
Turnell told the newspaper that he was initially detained at Yangon’s Insein prison in a concrete cell measuring six meters by 2.5 meters, in which a chair made of iron had leg irons bolted to the floor. According to the newspaper, he underwent two months of questioning at which time he was occasionally dragged from his bed and placed in the irons. The economist was reportedly quoted as saying that officials questioned him about his work for Suu Kyi and accused him of working for British intelligence and gun running.
He told the paper he was infected with Covid-19 five times and kept in solitary confinement for months. In the early days of his confinement, Turnell said he could hear the sounds of people outside banging pots and pans at night in protest against the military coup. “Then came the explosions and gunfire and people being tortured in rooms nearby. I thought, they’re not going to do that to me surely? Then after a while, I started thinking, maybe they will. I think they wanted me to hear it.”
Turnell said he had expected to be treated “with kid gloves”. “They didn’t stick electrodes to me, but I was thrown into filthy cells. The food they used to deliver to me (came) in a bucket. For 650 days, I ate out of a bucket.” In the Naypyidaw detention centre, to which he was later transferred, “it wasn’t even a new bucket, they were paint buckets”, he said. “They didn’t beat me, but they did push and shove me.”
In Naypyidaw, prisoners were locked away for 20 hours a day, Turnell said. “In the monsoon, the roof would leak and we would sit there all night sometimes with water just pouring down through the roof, clutching your clothes and blanket to try to keep them dry,” he said.
Turnell claimed that his wife, Ha Vu, an economist at Macquarie University in Australia, assisted him in surviving by routinely communicating over the phone and bringing books, cookies, and cake through the Australian embassy. The economist was released last week as part of an amnesty together with former British ambassador Vicky Bowman and Japanese journalist Toru Kubota. The economist was sentenced to three years in prison in September for violating Myanmar’s Official Secrets Act, which he vigorously rejected.