Australian recounts squalor, screams in Myanmar prison hell: ‘for 650 days, I ate out of a bucket’
- Sean Turnell, a former adviser to deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi, spent nearly two years in a Myanmar prison
- He said he was infected with Covid-19 five times and kept in solitary confinement for months before his release last week
An Australian economist released last week after nearly two years in a Myanmar jail has told of interrogations in leg irons, squalor and the sounds of screams from tortured cellmates.
Sean Turnell, who returned home to Sydney on Friday after being released as part of an amnesty of almost 6,000 prisoners, gave the first public details of his incarceration in an interview with The Australian newspaper published on Tuesday.
The former adviser to deposed Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi was detained by the military in February 2021 soon after its forces seized control of the country.
Turnell told the paper he was initially kept at Yangon’s Insein prison in a six metre by 2.5 metre concrete cell in which an iron chair with leg irons had been bolted to the floor.
He then endured two months of interrogations, the paper said, sometimes being taken from his bed to be locked in the irons.