Burma's State Media Blames Slain Japanese Journalist

သန္းေရႊပိုင္သတင္းစာ ဂ်ပန္သတင္းေထာက္ကိုစြပ္စြဲပုတ္ခတ္.. ေသဆံုးျခင္းဟာ သူကိုယ္တိုင္မွာပဲ အျပစ္ရွိဟုဆို.. ဂ်ပန္ႏိုင္ငံသား အမ်ားစု ဤသတင္းကိုဖတ္ဖို႔လုိ...

By The Associated Press
October 15, 2007

Burma's state-controlled media said Sunday that a Japanese journalist, killed during a crackdown on recent pro-democracy protests, was to blame for his own death because he put himself in harm's way.

Kenji Nagai, 50, a video journalist for Japan's APF News agency, was among at least 10 people killed in the September 26-27 crackdown, when soldiers fired automatic weapons into pro-democracy demonstrators.

"This was an accident. The journalist was not deliberately targeted," said an editorial in The New Light of Myanmar newspaper, a junta mouthpiece. "The fact that the Japanese journalist was among the protesters amounts to inviting danger."

The editorial also said Nagai had entered Burma on a tourist visa. "He should have come in with a journalist visa, since he was a journalist," it said. "If he had behaved like a tourist he would not have faced this tragic end."

Burma is believed to have rejected all visa applications from journalists during the pro-democracy protests.

Video footage of Nagai's death, broadcast around the world, appeared to show a soldier shooting the journalist at close range.

Japanese police say he is believed to have died from blood loss caused by at least one bullet penetrating his kidney.

Japan's foreign minister, Masahiko Komura, said earlier this month that Japan—Burma's largest aid donor—was preparing to suspend assistance to Burma in response to Nagai's death.