Around 8:30 am on Saturday morning, authorities were alerted of a car that was on fire approximately four miles outside of Yangon on the Yangon-Mandalay highway. Of the nine passengers onboard — seven women and two men — only one survived.
According to the statement of Aung Khant, the survivor, the group was on their way back from a pagoda. He had been the driver throughout the trip, but started getting tired when they were near Yangon. He then switched places with one of the other passengers, Win Tun, and shortly after, the car set on fire. Aung Khant claims that he managed to escape by quickly jumping out of the vehicle.
However, authorities are now treating Aung Khant as a suspect in what could’ve been a premeditated murder. Relatives of some of the deceased individuals also believe that it could be more than just sheer luck that allowed Aung Khant to survive the fire.
“He said that he and Ko Win Tun took turns driving. He wasn’t driving [at the time of the accident] and the car was hit on the left side, but somehow he managed to go past the person on the right side and get out. The car was hit on the left — there was no way for him to escape, he should’ve been stuck in that spot,” the husband of one of the victims told Kumudra.
“The windows of that car [model] also aren’t hard to open. If he really wanted to rescue the others, he could’ve smashed the glass. When we looked at video footage, he didn’t seem distressed. Instead, he was just calmly standing there with his hands on his waist.” It’s unclear whether the video footage in question was obtained from official or unofficial sources.
Details of the incident have also spread on Facebook, where several users have voiced their own suspicions of Aung Khant. Some have proposed that perhaps Aung Khant had recently gotten into a disagreement with the other passengers and wanted retaliation, pointing out that if he had jumped out of the vehicle like he said, then he would have had blood and cuts on his body from hitting the concrete road.
Aung Khant is currently being held by highway police for questioning. Relatives of the deceased have also said that they will be launching an independent investigation into the incident.
