Troops cleared protesters from the streets of central Rangoon today after giving them 10 minutes to leave or be shot as the Burma junta intensified a two-day crackdown on the largest uprising in 20 years.
At least nine people were killed, state television said, on a day when far fewer protesters took to the streets. Soldiers raided monasteries in the middle of the night and rounded up hundreds of the monks who had been leading them.
One of dead was a Japanese photographer, shot when soldiers cleared the area near Sule Pagoda, a city-centre focus of the protests, as loudspeakers blared out warnings.
About 200 soldiers marched towards the crowd and riot police clattered their rattan shields with wooden batons.
The army, which killed an estimated 3,000 people during the last major uprising in 1988, moved in after 1,000 chanting protesters hurled stones and water bottles at troops, prompting a police charge in which shots were fired and the Japanese went down.
Soldiers shot dead three more people in a subsequent protest outside the city's heart as crowds regrouped and taunted troops.
Their bodies were tossed in a ditch as troops chased fleeing people, beating anybody they could catch, witnesses said.
Another Buddhist monk was killed during the midnight raids on monasteries, witnesses said. Five monks were reported killed yesterday when security forces tried to disperse huge crowds protesting against 45 years of military rule.
Monks were kicked and beaten as soldiers rounded them up and shoved them onto trucks. Some of the monasteries were emptied of all but the very old and sick, people living nearby said.
The raids are likely to anger Burma's 56 million people, whose steadily declining living conditions took a turn for the worse last month when the junta imposed swingeing fuel price rises, sparking the initial, small protests.
Military officials release smoke canisters after firing upon a crowd of thousands, which took to the streets of Rangoon's city centre to protest today. Image: Reuters.
Elsewhere in Burma, the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission said it had received reports of a big demonstration in the northwest coastal town of Sittwe, as well as incidents in Pakokku, Mandalay and Moulmein.
It was unclear whether the protests in Rangoon would regain momentum in the absence of the monks, whose marches drew large numbers into what has become a head-on collision between the moral authority of the monks and the military machine.
The junta has have managed to live with tough sanctions from the United States and lesser ones from Europe for a decade.
Even China, the closest the isolated military leaders has to a friend, said it was "extremely concerned about the situation in Burma".
The Foreign Ministry urged all parties to "maintain restraint and appropriately handle the problems that have arisen".
The White House demanded an end to the crackdown, and the European Union said it was looking into reinforcing sanctions in response to the crackdown, which has already drawn more sanctions from the United States.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called it a "tragedy" and urged the generals to allow a UN envoy to visit and meet detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he would dispatch special envoy Ibrahim Gambari to Southeast Asia in the hope the generals would let him in.
However, in a sign of rifts within the international community at an emergency UN Security Council meeting, China ruled out sanctions or an official condemnation of the use of force.