WATCH: A video provided by a former military guard shows soldiers torturing two detainees at an infantry base in Mandalay region in October 2021.
Al Jazeera has also gathered testimonies from several military defectors who confirm that deaths in custody are common.
A senior officer, “AK”, who asked for a pseudonym to protect his identity, defected from the military after being forced to take part in an extrajudicial killing operation. He alleges that the murder of captured urban fighters is sanctioned at the highest level.
AK described a night in early 2024 when four suspected urban fighters were bound, blindfolded and taken away from one of the military’s deadliest interrogation facilities.
The four prisoners, suspected assassins, were tortured so badly that they had to be propped up by soldiers as they were taken to a waiting pickup truck. Surrounded by armed guards, the four were then transported to a quiet road away from the city and forced to kneel beside a ditch.
AK said a senior officer ordered the soldiers to shoot the men with pistols to avoid unnecessary noise.
The suspects were shot from behind, AK said, but they did not die immediately. As the rebels bled on the ground, the soldiers grew restless waiting for them to die, so they shot them again, then again.
“I don’t think they knew that was the moment they would die, until they heard bullets … their deaths were so brutal I couldn’t sleep for a week,” AK told Al Jazeera.
The men’s bodies were then transferred to a military hospital, where AK says doctors signed certificates that obscured their cause of death. Medical staff employed by the military are often pressured to cover up such murders, he says.
Al Jazeera has seen photos of three of the men’s bodies, along with leaked copies of the official death report, which says they were killed while trying to escape. The injuries visible in the photos do not match that claim. One photo, AK pointed out, shows one of the men with his eyes covered and his hands tied, challenging the account that he had been trying to get away.
Claiming that prisoners were killed while trying to flee is a common narrative used by the military to cover up extrajudicial killings, the former senior officer said.
Some of the details about the executions that AK shared have been omitted here due to concern about reprisals. But to verify this incident, Al Jazeera triangulated testimonies and leaked documents with local media reports and interviews with former military and civil society organisation sources.
Critically, AK explained such murders could not take place without the approval of senior military officials.
“No one could leave that detention centre without approval from the top,” he said.
Al Jazeera also spoke with two former army doctors who served on different bases after the coup. Both said they were prevented from providing medical attention to civilians aligned with the resistance who had serious injuries. After the coup, they said, it became common practice for senior military doctors to fake the causes of death of detainees who had been killed or left to die in custody.
The doctors, who requested anonymity, confirmed that such cover-ups by military leaders are both organised and strategic, allowing detainees to be murdered or left to die while the regime avoids accountability.
WATCH: Former army doctors describe being forced to leave detainees to die and made to falsify causes of death in custody.