Petrol bomb hurled at Aung San Suu Kyi's home where she spent 15 years during junta rule
Myanmar's state counsellor and the de facto leader was not present in the Yangon house when the attack took place.
A petrol bomb was hurled at Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi's lakeside home in Yangon, where she spent 15 years under house arrest during the lengthy junta rule. The motive for the attack is unclear.
Suu Kyi, a pro-democracy icon and a Nobel peace laureate, was not present in the home when the bomb was thrown. She was said to have been in the capital Naypyidaw at the time of the incident.
"We were able to put out the fire in time and no casualties occurred in the incident," a government spokesperson told China's Xinhua news agency. The bomb is thought to have caused minor damage to the villa where Suu Kyi lived until 2010.
Her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), rode to a historic electoral win in 2015 when the beleaguered Southeast Asian nation was making a gradual transition to democracy crawling out of the clutches of military rule.
That was the first time Myanmar held free and fair elections in more than quarter of a century.
However, months after she came into power, Suu Kyi faced mounting criticism over her handling of the Rohingya crisis. More than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled the country from the northern Rakhine state to mostly Bangladesh to escape a crackdown by Myanmar's forces.
The ethnic Rohingyas, who have been persecuted in a systematic manner for the past few years, are often dubbed as a stateless minority and are branded illegal immigrants in the Buddhist-majority country.
