Two women present during a fatal attack on a priest in Myanmar have revealed details about how the priest died.
Fr. Donald Martin Ye Naing Win, 44, was brutally attacked February 14 in the rectory of Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Kangyi Taw, a village in the northwestern region of Sagaing.
Allegedly, the attackers had first threatened and silenced two women, teachers and parish workers who were on the church premises and were helping Fr. Donald organize classes for the children of the parish's roughly 40 families.
Fides, the information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies, claimed to have received news about the women’s testimony after it reached the Ministry of Justice of the National Unity Government (NUG) in exile. They said that the attackers came from a neighboring village and seemed to be either drunk or on drugs. They commanded Fr. Donald to kneel, and he responded, "I only kneel before God: What can I do for you? Is there a matter we can discuss?"
One of the men responded by striking the priest from behind with a dagger that was still in its sheath, but he accidentally hit the leader of the armed group, who in turn pulled out a knife and angrily attacked the priest, repeatedly stabbing him in the body and neck.
“Fr. Donald did not utter a word or complain,” according to Fides. “He endured the senseless violence without reacting, like an innocent man, ‘like a lamb to the slaughter,’ as the witnesses report. The other men stood by and watched the murder being carried out. The repeated blows to the throat almost severed the head from the body, which sank in a lake of blood. After the crime, the group of men left the scene.”
The women raised an alarm, and the People's Defense Force, a rebel group that controls the area, tracked the men down. The Government of National Unity issued a statement saying the men belong to a “local defence group.”
Fr. Donald was a priest of the Archdiocese of Mandalay. When Archbishop Marco Tin Win of Mandalay presided at his funeral, he appealed to "all armed groups and actors involved in the conflict to lay down their weapons and take a path of peace and reconciliation.”
