July 26, 2022: -On Sunday, Myanmar’s military authorities executed four democracy activists accused of supporting carrying out “terror acts,” state media said, the Southeast Asian nation’s initial executions in decades.

In January, sentenced to death in a closed-door trial, the four men were accused of supporting militias to fight the army that took away power in a coup in the previous year and revealed a bloody crackdown on its opponents.

Myanmar’s National Unity Government (NUG), a shadow administration outlawed by the ruling military junta, condemned the reported executions.

“Extremely saddened condemn the junta’s cruelty with strongest terms if it’s the case,” the NUG president’s office spokesman Kyaw Zaw told Reuters.

“The global community must punish their cruelty.”

Among the executed were democracy figure Kyaw Min Yu, called Jimmy, and former lawmaker and hip-hop singer Phyo Zeya Thaw, the Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper added.

In June, Kyaw Min Yu, aged 53, and Phyo Zeya Thaw, an aged 41-year-old supporter of ousted Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, failed their appeals against the sentences. The two different executed were Hla Myo Aung and Aung Thura Zaw.

Thazin Nyunt Aung’s wife, Phyo Zeyar Thaw, says that she had not been told of her husband’s execution.

The four had been arrested under the counter-terrorism law and the penal code, and the punishment carrying out according to prison procedure, the paper said, without elaborating. The last executions in Myanmar have been hanging for a long time.

An activist group, the Assistance Association of Political Prisoners, said Myanmar’s latest judicial executions were in the late 1980s.