In a press conference broadcast by state television on October 7, 1998, a senior military intelligence officer accused Yan Aung Soe, a journalist, writer, and political activist, of being involved in a wide-ranging plot by the political opposition to “incite anarchy and uprising,” as translated by the BBC. Air Force Col. Thein Swe, of the Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Studies, identified “Yan Aung Soe, alias Ye Htut,” as a “hardcore member” of the Democratic Party for a New Society. (Yan Aung Soe is also known as Ye Htut, but he is not the journalist Ye Htut who was arrested in September 1995 on the charge of sending “fabricated news” to individuals and media organizations abroad. The latter Ye Htut was included in CPJ’s previous records of imprisoned journalists in Burma but was released in 2001, according to Burmese journalists in Thailand.) The officer said that Yan Aung Soe was involved in writing, printing, and distributing anti-government pamphlets.
Yan Aung Soe, also known by his pen name Thurein Htet Linn, was arrested in September 1998 and sentenced to 52 years in prison, according to the Thailand-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners in Burma. The group says he is jailed at Myaungmya Prison.