AFP, YANGON: Thousands of mourners gathered on Monday to bury a top Muslim lawyer and adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi who was gunned down outside Yangon airport in what the ruling party said was a political assassination.Ko Ni, a legal adviser to the National League for Democracy, was shot in the head on Sunday afternoon as he waited outside the airport while holding his grandson.
His killing sent shockwaves through both Myanmar’s already hard-pressed Muslim community and the ruling party in a country where political killings are rare.
Police have not said what prompted the murder, but Ko Ni, 63, was a prominent Muslim figure who spoke out against the increasingly vocal anti-Islamic sentiments of Buddhist hardliners and criticised the powerful military’s grip on power. Distraught relatives were joined by senior NLD figures, imams, Buddhist monks and members of the public who crammed into a Muslim cemetery on the outskirts of Yangon on Monday afternoon.
 “This is a very cruel and ugly tragedy,” Moe Zaw, a 37-year-old Muslim mourner told AFP. Both the NLD and Ko Ni’s family suspect he was targeted because of his politics.
“We strongly denounce the assassination of Ko Ni like this as it is a terrorist act against the NLD’s policies,” the NLD said in a statement, describing him as an “irreplacable” aide to Suu Kyi.