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Warrior teen twins surrender
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THE gun-toting, cheroot-smoking child leaders of the mysterious God's Army rebel group were in Thai police custody on Wednesday after surrendering along with a band of their followers.
Twin brothers Luther and Johnny Htoo, the teenage guerrilla leaders reputed to be immune to bullets, were paraded in front of the media after their capture by army troops inside the Thai border on early Tuesday.
Looking thin, dirty and exhausted, they said nothing but gave a few shy smiles as they sat puffing on cigarettes with the rest of their bedraggled group, mostly other children as well as one woman and an older youth.
Provincial governor Komes Daengthong-dee said the figureheads of the anti-Myanmar rebel group were 15 years old, but the slightly built pair looked years younger.
Two male fighters who surrendered with them were held separately after being charged with carrying out a bloody New Year's Eve raid on a nearby village.
After a torrid year in which it came under attack from two national armies, God's Army was now all but destroyed, officials said.
Thai Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai, who travelled to Ratchaburi to meet with the group, welcomed their surrender and said a decision would now be made over whether the 17 captives would be prosecuted or given asylum.
Chuan said after meeting the twins: “I'd like to see them with their parents and going to school.”
In the jungle, the boys became revered at the age of nine by a band of superstitious rebels after leading a counter-attack against the Myanmar army.
A religious offshoot of the ethnic Karen National Union which for decades has fought for independence from Myanmar, God's Army has probably never numbered more than a few hundred fighters.
It rose to infamy a year ago when its fighters, working with an allied rebel group, seized a major Ratchaburi hospital and held hundreds hostage before Thai special forces killed all the guerrillas in a dawn raid.
Its involvement in the hostage drama, as well as the curious story of the twins, who claim to conjure up ghostly armies in battles against Yangon's troops, brought it fame well out of proportion to its size.
Its luck ran out last year when the Myanmar army overran the group's jungle headquarters, forcing its members to live off the land and forage for food.
And the final straw for the ragtag band came when the series of violent attacks on Thai soil prompted a military offensive that severed its supply lines and pushed it to the brink of starvation.
Thai police said two men among the first group to surrender were charged with robbery and murder over the New Year's Eve raid on a Ratchaburi village where six Thais were killed.
But the fame of the strange young boys is unlikely to subside even after they are delivered to refugee camps.
“I just want to see them, what they look like, I want to know how they could lead their group in battle,” said schoolteacher Sunant Kongying, one of the crowd of locals who waited at the police base for a glimpse of the pair.(SD-Agencies)
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