A crowd of protesters gathered outside a Yangon monastery to demand action against the attackers on Thursday morning
A group that included monks used metal sticks to smash the windows of cars that were blocking traffic as part of the civil disobedience campaign against military rule on Thursday, injuring one of the drivers in the attack.
The attackers damaged four vehicles on Kabar Aye Pagoda road in Yangon and beat one of the drivers, leaving him with wounds on his face, witnesses said.
Drivers across the city were staging a “broken down cars” campaign for a second day, blocking major roads or driving extremely slowly to prevent people from going to work.
It is part of wider efforts to shut down the military’s ability to govern with strikes and work stoppages.
After the attack, a crowd of people including the owners of the vandalised cars gathered outside the nearby Shwe Kyin monastery in Bahan township, where the monks were last seen, to demand action against the attackers.
Members of the crowd said that the attackers were not real monks, to which a monk from the monastery responded: “Don’t ever say the word fake monk.”
Another monk there denied anyone from his monastery had smashed the car windows or beat the driver and said the case should be reported to the authorities.
A police officer who had arrived at the scene of the attack earlier to take notes about the incident refused to go to the monastery with the crowd.
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Pyinnyawuntha, a member of the Patriotic Young Monks Union, an ultranationalist group, who vandalized the cars is a well-known participant in the pro-military rallies.
Witnesses reported on social media that at least four monks had vandalized the cars with metal batons. Photos posted on Facebook showed that one of the monks was Pyinnyawuntha, a member of the Patriotic Young Monks Union, an ultranationalist group.
Pyinnyawuntha was sentenced to a year in prison for incitement in June last year for joining an anti-government protest in Yangon in 2017. He was also charged under the Peaceful Assembly Law and fined 10,000 kyat for organising a protest supporting the formerly detained far-right monk Wirathu in January this year.
Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in Yangon and elsewhere on Wednesday in what was considered the largest day of demonstrations against the regime since its February 1 coup.
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