A family, including children, from Masa Village in Leiktho Township, Taungoo District of the Brigade 2 of the Karen National Union (KNU), was abducted from its home by junta troops and has been held for more than a month.
In the second week of December 2025, a junta column of around 50 troops raided a house in the village and abducted a married couple, their two sons aged 3 and 6, and a 10-year-old boy living with them—five people in total, locals reported.
“We don’t even know if they’re still alive. It’s been over a month since they were taken, and no one knows where they are. Around 50 soldiers took them away. Along with the four family members, a boy who worked as a cattle herder was also taken,” said a villager close to the abducted family.
The soldiers who abducted the family are believed to be troops based in Shwenankalay Village and are still monitoring the area around the family’s home, according to locals.
A few days after the abduction, junta troops returned to the house, ransacked it, and looted anything they deemed useful, witnesses said.
In Taungoo District, where KNU Brigade 2 is mainly active, junta battalions and troops deployed along major roads and at busy intersections have frequently checked pedestrians and carried out arbitrary detentions since the coup.
In some cases, entire families were detained for unknown reasons and never released, or were killed. However, relatives of the victims do not dare to expose these incidents for fear of retaliation by the junta, sources close to the matter told KIC.
“We only know about the killings that were reported to us, but there could be many more that never got reported. The cases people kept quiet about have simply disappeared. Nobody dared to speak up because they feared retaliation from the junta,” Padoh Saw De Pho, chair of KNU’s Taungoo District Administration, told KIC in an interview.
In particular, in Thandaunggyi Township's Thandaung, Leiktho and Yardo towns, the junta is increasingly restricting travel, conducting strict checks, abducting and extorting money from locals, according to the KNU.
