Burma's junta arrested more people under the cover of darkness last night despite international outrage during a keenly watched UN mission to bring an end to a bloody crackdown on protests.
At least eight truckloads of prisoners were hauled out of downtown Rangoon, Burma's biggest city and centre of monk-led protests against decades of military rule and deepening economic hardship, witnesses said.
In one house near the Shwedagon Pagoda, the holiest shrine in the devoutly Buddhist country and starting point for last week's rallies, only a 13-year-old girl remained. Her parents had been taken in the middle of the night, she said.
The crackdown continued despite some hopes of progress by UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari on his mission to persuade junta chief Senior General Than Shwe to relax his iron grip and open talks with detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he met twice.
Mr Gambari was in Singapore today after his four-day trip to Burma. He and General Than Shwe sat in the same room together yesterday for more than an hour in the remote capital of Naypyitaw. But neither side issued any comment that could satisfy the world's hopes for a halt to the junta's harsh crackdown on protesters.
UN sources said Mr Gambari expected to return in early November to Burma, whose generals seldom heed outside pressure and rarely grant UN officials permission to visit. However, there were no indications of how his mission and international pressure might change junta policies.
The junta insists it dealt with the protests, which at their height filled five city blocks, with "the least force possible" and said only 10 people were killed in the restoration of order. Dissident groups say up to 200 protesters were killed and 6,000 detained in the crackdown.
Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, the United Nations' human rights envoy for Burma, said in Geneva the number of those detained was now in the thousands.
The junta appears to believe it has beaten the biggest challenge to its power in nearly 20 years, which began with small marches against shock fuel price rises in August and swelled after troops fired over the heads of a group of monks.
It has re-opened Shwedagon and the Sule pagoda, the end point of the protest marches, after cordoning off a wide area around them and sending soldiers to virtually every street corner of Rangoon, preventing crowds from gathering. It is also sending gangs through homes looking for monks in hiding, sweeping raids that western diplomats say are creating a climate of terror.
The military has ruled Burma since 1962, and the current junta came to power in 1988 after crushing a much larger pro-democracy movement in which at least 3,000 people were killed. The generals called elections in 1990 but refused to give up power when Ms Suu Kyi's party won.