The family friend started by explaining some background to the situation. He was the person who found her mutilated body after the intensive search, but was sentenced to a year in jail for posting the infamous pictures of the body from the crime scene on social media. There is a large population of Bengalis in an adjacent village to the cluster who were angry in 2012 about not being eligible for the NRC, national ID cards. Leading up to the murder of Ma Thida Htwe, there were many other cases of rapes and attempted rapes by the Bengalis on the ethnic Rakhine women. However, the mawlawis (imams) would bribe officials to make these cases disappear and remain unpublicised.
He clarified his previous statements to us by saying that the Bengali rapists back then were never brought to justice, or even investigated by police, since the mawlawi would go to the police station to bribe officials in an environment of corruption. Harassment, sexual or otherwise, from the Bengalis was commonplace towards the Rakhine people, who had to cross through their village in order to get to the other side of the village cluster, none of which was taken seriously by the authorities at the time. For many years, the ethnic Rakhines in the adjacent villages of Kyauk Ni Maw township were living in a continual state of fear from the hostile Bengalis, who were showing increasing signs of attachment to violent jihad. Further, he explained to us that the Bengalis would tear the clothes of these women as they escaped being raped, but nobody was murdered in this rape crisis until Ma Thida Htwe.
Next, the family friend answered the question “Did Ma Thida Htwe know any Bengalis as friends?” — NO. They were completely segregated in her group of villages, so she had no prior knowledge of her Bengali killers before the murder. Later reports say the men had been stalking Ma Thida Htwe for awhile, so they knew her daily routine. The family friend explained the village tract layout to an Arakanese translator, who drew the outline on a map whose details are not available in online maps. He further explained that Ma Thida Htwe was not engaged to anybody. She was a single, devout woman who had no marriage or boyfriend. She spent a great deal of her adult life as a nun, living in and visiting monasteries, as picture evidence and letters submitted by the family supports. Before her death, she worked across the clustered villages on a sewing machine owned by a businessman. He explained that she worked as a seamstress in Kyauk Ni Maw township after returning from studying meditation at a monastery in Yangon for an extended period of time.
Ma Thida Htwe was walking to the other side of the village tract to go swimming with her friend, a local carpenter who was giving her swimming lessons. She had to pass some villages in a cluster, including a Bengali village, to get there. On the way home, she stopped at a Bengali restaurant on the main thoroughfare for a drink. She saw the Bengali mawlawi Zaw Min at the restaurant, who later lied and claimed he had not seen her, but they know she was followed by her murderers after this stop. She was almost home when she was attacked by the men, having visited the monastery on the way back. Had the mawlawi spoken the truth when Ma Thida Htwe disappeared, she would most likely have been found alive.
When she didn’t arrive home on time that afternoon, her family and uncle called the carpenter’s house; the carpenter became very worried for her safety. The uncle at the interview reported her as a missing person to the police after speaking to the carpenter. A large search for her was quickly organized, because they knew something was wrong. At this point, the mawlawi from the roadside restaurant was questioned about her presence at the restaurant, but he lied about not seeing her. There was only a short period of time between the time Ma Thida Htwe actually disappeared and the time she was known to be missing, because her mother knew something was wrong as soon as she did not return home at the expected time. Her mother explained that Ma Thida Htwe was never late in returning home. In the interview, the family was emphatic about the point that the mawlawi from the restaurant lied during the early stages of the missing person search, shortly after she was known to have disappeared.
We were told by the family friend that she even stopped at the monastery on her way to the carpenter’s house and on the way back before she was murdered. The search extended to the next morning, when her body was found in a farmer’s field by the family friend, who guarded the body. Her jewellery was stolen. Her lifeless body showed signs of extreme trauma, mutilation and rape.
Ma Thida Htwe was not only robbed of her few small possessions, but she was beaten across the face, her neck was sliced open from ear to ear, both her ear lobes were sliced off for the earrings, she was stabbed through the chest, and her female organ was stabbed and horribly mutilated by knives in a truly barbaric display of sexual violence, or rape using a deadly weapon. During the interview, the family friend showed us in detail exactly every wound he found when he discovered the body. Other eyewitnesses who saw the body say there were unmistakable signs of sexual violence and rape, supported by the initial police forensic report made shortly thereafter. From an examination of pictures taken at the crime scene that were posted on social media at the time, her undergarments were found removed and thrown next to the body with what looks like to be her swimming clothes, as more evidence of sexual violence.
It was explained to us in the interviews that the three Bengalis were reported as missing persons to the police by their families the morning after Ma Thida Htwe disappeared, the same morning when her body was found. This fact greatly narrowed down the list of suspects. The three Bengali fugitives were caught trying to sell her stolen jewellery for money to escape. Later, the stolen jewellery was returned to the family, and her earrings and gold ring were shown to us by her mother at the interview. The fugitives told the mawlawi about their crime, who hid them and tried to smuggle them out of the area in order to escape to Thandwe on a boat. Thandwe has a large Bengali population and is a well known epicenter for human trafficking in Rakhine, from which the murderers were likely looking to escape into Bangladesh.