UN team meets Suu Kyi over Rohingya

NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar, Apr 30 (AFP): Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi received a UN Security Council delegation Monday in the highest-level diplomatic visit since the start of the Rohingya crisis, which will include a brief tour of violence-hit Rakhine state.

Suu Kyi, the de facto leader of mainly Buddhist Myanmar, has been pilloried overseas for her failure to speak up for the Muslim Rohingya or publicly condemn the army for driving them out of the country.

On Monday afternoon she chaired a meeting of 15 UN delegates, according to a Ministry of Information photograph, as the UN tries to put more pressure on Myanmar to allow refugees to return safely.

The UN delegates will travel by helicopter Tuesday over the scarred landscape of northern Rakhine state, the scene of an army campaign starting last August that drove around 700,000 of the minority into neighbouring Bangladesh.