Casualties
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The number of casualties is not yet clear. According to ABC, the military crackdown claimed hundreds of lives. The official toll remains at 13 killed. Kenji Nagai, the Japanese photo journalist, is believed to currently be the only foreign casualty of the unrest. However, it is possible that the death toll may be many times greater than officially reported.
Speaking before the UN General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro said that independent sources reported 30 to 40 monks and 50 to 70 civilians killed as well as 200 beaten.
Democratic Voice of Burma puts the number of deaths at 138, basing their figure on a list compiled by the 88 Student Generation group in Myanmar. The Executive Director of the DVB, Aye Chan Naing, told the Associated Press that "his 138 figure is quite credible because it is based on names of victims, I also think the figure is accurate because of the pictures coming from inside Burma. The way they were shooting into the crowds with machine guns means dozens of people could have died."
A report in the Daily Mail states that "housands of protesters are dead and the bodies of hundreds of executed monks have been dumped in the jungle", the report is based on information provided by Colonel Hla Win, who defected from the army some days prior to the report, he is quoted as having said "Many more people have been killed in recent days than you've heard about. The bodies can be counted in several thousand.".
Australia's The Age reports that, after two non-protesters were shot in northwest Yangon, "the army came back, gave the families 20,000 kyat (~$20) each and took away the corpses."
Reports forwarded by Times Online stated that the abbot of Ngwe Kyar Yan monastery in north west Yangon was so severely beaten by soldiers "that he died on the spot"; the soldiers had been lining monks up against a wall and smashing each of their heads against the wall in succession before throwing them into trucks.
The final death toll still remained 31 confirmed by the UN human rights envoy to Burma, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro.
Read more about this topic: 2007 Burmese Anti-government Protests