"Ye Yint Naing was just 15 years old when he died. A bullet hit him in the back, and he fell to the ground. Everyone else around him also dropped, as the bullets continued to fly. No one dared try to help him. “They kept shooting,” his brother recalled. “They shot at anybody who tried to get up. So he just lay there for about two hours.” Ye Yint Naing died on March 27, the day that saw the highest number of casualties from crackdowns on anti-coup protests since Myanmar’s military seized power on February 1. Like countless others around the country, Ye Yint Naing had joined a protest to mark Anti-Fascist Resistance Day, in defiance of the junta that called the same occasion Armed Forces Day. “He said that if he didn’t take part in the protest, he couldn’t call himself a true native of Muse,” his mother, Moe Moe, told Myanmar Now, referring to Ye Yint Naing’s hometown in northern Shan state. “I couldn’t stop him. So he left home and went to the protest,” she said, recalling the last time she saw her son alive. The following morning, Ye Yint Naing’s family received what was left of him—not his lifeless body, but a pile of charred bones. The authorities assured them they were his. The soldiers who dragged his body away after the protest deposited it at a local municipal cemetery, where it was cremated despite the fact that the practice is forbidden by Islam, the family’s religion. According to a social welfare group familiar with the case, no attempt was made to locate the family of the deceased boy before the cremation. The military simply labelled his body an “ownerless corpse” and disposed of it without further ceremony. “The army wanted to annihilate my brother. He was only 15 years old. They brutally murdered him. They should at least have returned his body to us,” his brother said..."