Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo: 511 Days for Telling the Truth
The Investigation
In December 2017, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, two Reuters reporters in Myanmar, were investigating a massacre. Ten Rohingya Muslim men and boys had been killed by Myanmar soldiers and Buddhist villagers in the village of Inn Din, in Rakhine State, during the military's brutal campaign against the Rohingya minority.
The massacre at Inn Din was one incident in a larger campaign that the United Nations would later describe as bearing the hallmarks of genocide. Over 700,000 Rohingya had fled to Bangladesh. Thousands had been killed. Villages had been burned. The Myanmar military denied systematic abuses and restricted media access to Rakhine State.
Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, were among the very few journalists working to document what was actually happening. They had obtained testimony from witnesses, photographs of the victims, and — crucially — confirmation from soldiers who had participated in the killing. Their reporting would become the most detailed account of a specific atrocity in the Rohingya crisis.
The Trap
On December 12, 2017, the two reporters went to dinner with police officers they had been cultivating as sources. At the dinner, the officers handed them documents. As the reporters left the restaurant, they were arrested by plainclothes police who were waiting outside.
The setup was transparent. A police captain later testified in court that his superior had ordered him to arrange the meeting and plant the documents on the reporters. The testimony directly contradicted the prosecution's case. The judge convicted them anyway.
Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were charged under Myanmar's Official Secrets Act, a colonial-era law dating from 1923, when Burma was a British colony. They were convicted on September 3, 2018, and sentenced to seven years in prison.
511 Days
The reporters spent 511 days in Insein Prison, one of Myanmar's most notorious detention facilities. Their imprisonment became one of the most prominent press freedom cases in the world. Reuters mounted a sustained global campaign for their release. Press freedom organisations, foreign governments, and the United Nations called for their freedom.
During their imprisonment, the investigation they had been working on was published by Reuters — completed by their colleagues using the reporting Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo had gathered before their arrest. The story, published in February 2018, documented the Inn Din massacre in meticulous detail: the identities of the victims, the testimony of the soldiers, the photographs, and the chain of command.
In April 2019, while still in prison, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. They received the news in their cells.
They were released on May 6, 2019, under a presidential amnesty, after serving more than 16 months of their seven-year sentences.
The Consequences
The Reuters investigation contributed to international pressure on Myanmar's military. The soldiers involved in the Inn Din massacre were, unusually, prosecuted by the Myanmar military itself — sentenced to ten years' hard labour, though they were released after less than a year under a general amnesty.
The International Criminal Court authorised an investigation into the deportation of Rohingya to Bangladesh. The International Court of Justice ordered Myanmar to take emergency measures to prevent genocide against the Rohingya.
In February 2021, Myanmar's military seized power in a coup, overthrowing the elected government and imposing the most severe crackdown on civil liberties in the country's modern history. As of 2025, Myanmar holds 27 journalists behind bars, according to CPJ. The country has become one of the world's worst environments for press freedom.
Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were released before the coup. Had they still been in prison in 2021, their prospects for release would have been vastly worse.
What They Proved
The case of Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo proved several things simultaneously.
It proved that the police setup was deliberate — testified to, under oath, by a police captain who broke ranks. It proved that the judicial system was willing to convict reporters despite evidence of entrapment. It proved that the Myanmar military's response to reporting on its atrocities was to imprison the reporters rather than investigate the atrocities. The soldiers who committed the massacre served less time in prison than the journalists who reported it.
It also proved that killing the story by imprisoning the journalists did not work. Reuters published the investigation. The Pulitzer committee honoured it. The international community acted on it, however inadequately. The reporters went to prison, but the reporting reached the world.
When Wa Lone was released, he told Reuters: "I'm really happy and excited to see my family and my colleagues. I can't wait to go back to the newsroom."
He went back to the newsroom. The story he and Kyaw Soe Oo reported from Inn Din — ten men and boys, lined up at the edge of a grave, shot and buried — is part of the permanent record. The soldiers who killed them served months. The journalists who documented it served 511 days. The record survives them all.