More arrests in Myanmar

Yangon: Myanmar's junta arrested more people under the cover of darkness on Wednesday despite a crescendo of international outrage during a keenly watched UN mission to bring an end to a bloody crackdown on protests.

At least eight truckloads of prisoners were hauled out of downtown Yangon, the former Burma's biggest city and centre of monk-led protests against decades of military rule and deepening economic hardship, witnesses said.

In one house near the Shwedagon Pagoda, the holiest shrine in devoutly Buddhist Myanmar and starting point for last week's rallies, only a 13-year-old girl remained. Her parents had been taken in the middle of the night, she said.

There was no word on where the prisoners were being taken or how many they would join. Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, the United Nations' human rights envoy for Myanmar, said in Geneva the number of those detained was now in the thousands.

The crackdown continued despite faint signs of progress by UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari on his mission to persuade junta chief Than Shwe to relax his iron grip and open talks with detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he met twice.

UN sources said Gambari expected to return in early November to Myanmar, whose generals rarely heed outside pressure and equally rarely grant UN officials permission to visit.

Gambari, a former Nigerian foreign minister, was due to meet Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Wednesday before heading back to New York after a four-day stay in Myanmar, half of it spent waiting to see Senior General Than Shwe.

The junta insists it dealt with the protests, which at their height filled five city blocks, with "the least force possible" and said only 10 people were killed in the restoration of order.

Western governments and human rights groups say the toll is probably far higher, and the passing of time is not reducing the level of international outrage.

However, the junta appears to believe it has beaten the biggest challenge to its power in nearly 20 years, which began with small marches against shock fuel price rises in August and swelled after troops fired over the heads of a group of monks.

It has re-opened the Shwedagon and Sule pagoda, the end point of the mass protest marches, after cordoning off a wide area around them and sending soldiers to virtually every street corner of Yangon, preventing any protest crowds from coalescing.

It is also sending gangs through homes looking for monks in hiding, a series of a sweeping raids that western diplomats say are creating a climate of terror.