Myanmar police sought permission from the nation's president to go ahead with an investigation into whether two Reuters journalists had breached the Official Secrets Act only an hour after arresting them last month, a Yangon court heard on Tuesday.
The two reporters, Wa Lone, 31, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 27, had worked on Reuters coverage of a crisis in Rakhine state, where an army crackdown on insurgents since the end of August has triggered the flight of 688,000 Rohingya Muslims, according to the United Nations.
They were detained on Dec. 12 after they had been invited to meet police officers over dinner in Yangon. The reporters have told relatives they were arrested almost immediately after being handed some documents at a restaurant by two policemen they had not met before.
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