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Yangon: Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was yesterday taken from her villa and de facto prison of the last four years to a state guesthouse where she has previously met foreign diplomats, her party and sources said.
There was no immediate word on the purpose of the trip, although the most likely explanation could be a meeting with Aung Kyi, a senior member of the military junta appointed as a go-between in the wake of last month's brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests.
A security source said the 62-year-old Nobel laureate had returned to her lakeside villa, where she has spent most of the last 12 years under house arrest, an hour later.
Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD), the party which won a 1990 election by a landslide only to be denied power by the military, could not immediately confirm what transpired at the guest house, where she met UN special envoy Ebrahim Gambari on October 2.
The barbed wire barricades that have sealed off the road outside her home since protests started in August against fuel price rises and decades of military rule remained in place, scuppering hopes she might be about to be released.
Junta representative
Aung Kyi, a trusted regime fixer, was appointed two weeks ago after Gambari flew in at the height of a crackdown on the biggest protests in two decades with a message from the Security Council telling the generals to talk to Suu Kyi about reform.
After Gambari's departure, junta leader Senior General Than Shwe made a highly conditional offer of talks with Suu Kyi, although given his widely known loathing for "The Lady", as her supporters call her, many doubt his sincerity.
Meanwhile, Gambari held talks with China's communist rulers yesterday on the latest leg of a regional tour to build a united Asian diplomatic front against the generals.
However, Beijing - one of Myanmar's key trading partners and the closest it has to an ally - gave no indications it was willing to exert tougher pressure, stressing that words, not sanctions, were the way forward.
"The Myanmar issue, after all, has to be appropriately resolved by its own people and government through their own efforts of dialogue and consultation," State Councillor Tang Jiaxuan told Gambari.
Gambari, who is expected to return to Myanmar in early November, did not talk to reporters in Beijing before his scheduled departure to Japan.
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