Myanmar releases new Aung San Suu Kyi pictures, confirms King Charles III sent her books

Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi received a package from Britain's King Charles III on Monday (Oct 19), authorities said, and released the first pictures of the detained Nobel laureate in two months. She was described as a “special female prisoner" as the Myanmar junta regime for the first time have used the term to describe Suu Kyi. She was deposed in a military coup in 2021, triggering an ongoing civil war that has killed more than 100,000 people, according to monitor ACLED. The coup leader and former junta chief Min Aung Hlaing was installed as civilian president in April following elections that did not include Suu Kyi's party, and she was moved to house arrest soon afterwards. Fact-checkers from AFP confirmed that the images were real and not created using Meta Generative AI or OpenAI tools.

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In a statement, the authorities said that home ministry officials met her to deliver a package of two books about soil, "one sealed envelope, and a sealed diplomatic communication sent by King Charles III of the United Kingdom to the special female detainee", Myanmar's presidential spokeswoman said on her Facebook page. The two books delivered to her were "The Land Gardeners: Soil to Table" and "Soil: The ​World at Our Feet." Accompanying the statement were two images of Suu Kyi meeting two men with their backs to the camera. The pictures appeared to be in a similar room to the last released images of her, when she met a Red Cross representative in August, her first publicised meeting with a foreign official since her ouster.

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Britain is Myanmar's former colonial power and the monarch is known to have a keen interest in gardening and the environment. In response to questions from AFP the Foreign Office in London did not say whether British diplomats had sought to deliver the package in person, or been refused permission to do so. Britain condemns what it describes as Suu Kyi's "arbitrary detention" and calls for her immediate and unconditional release.

Suu Kyi remains detained on charges rights groups say were concocted to return power to the military, which has historically ruled Myanmar since independence. "I have been extremely lenient toward her," Min Aung Hlaing said in an interview with Time magazine published last month.