September 5, 2026
A young student riding his bicycle in Yangon’s Thaketa Township was chased and nearly abducted for forced conscription by the military junta, according to the Rangoon Scout Network.
The incident occurred on September 2, shortly after 7:00 AM. A young boy, estimated to be a 9th-grade student, was riding his bicycle between the Kyan Mar Yay bus stop and the Fire Station intersection on Myin Taw Thar Road in Thaketa. Four men in plain clothes ordered him to stop his bicycle.
When the student refused to stop and continued riding, the four men chased after him, eventually causing him to fall off his bike. As the men attempted to grab him, the boy desperately explained that he was a student on his way to school. Upon hearing this, the four men abandoned the abduction and let him go.
“Nowadays, junta troops mostly wear plain clothes when making arrests. Sometimes, uniformed police are also involved, and there are cases where soldiers patrol in military trucks and grab people. We have to check our old data to confirm if arrests have happened at that specific spot before. Because there are so many abduction locations in Thaketa, it’s hard to keep track of them all, but we assume arrests have likely happened there previously,” an official from the Rangoon Scout Network stated.
With a new batch of military service training approaching, the junta is desperately trying to fill its quotas by deploying plainclothes personnel to abduct civilians off the streets. Consequently, local residents are refusing to go out at night without an urgent reason.
“They are frantically abducting people to fill the quota because a new training batch is about to start. They always intensify the arrests right before a new batch, and a new batch begins every month. Around the Htauk Kyant intersection, the streets now empty out by 8:00 PM. Normally, that area would be busy until 10:00 PM. It is the same situation in other places,” the official added.
In a similar incident on September 2, shortly after 7:00 PM, two men walking near a supermarket by Taw Win Plaza on Set Yone Road in Mingalar Taung Nyunt Township were dragged into a closed van and abducted by three men in plain clothes.
