Suu Kyi party members barred from Myanmar memorial

YANGON, July 19 (Reuters) Around 200 members of military-ruled Myanmar's main opposition party were barred today from attending a memorial to the murdered father of detained democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi.

Soldiers stopped the group, all members of Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD), at a wooden and barbed-wire barricade near the Martyrs' Mausoleum, where slain independence hero General Aung San is commemorated every year.

After refusing to accept a request to remove their party regalia, the group paid their respects from the road before returning to their headquarters.

Nobel peace laureate Suu Kyi, who has spent more than 10 of the last 17 years either in prison or under house arrest, turned down an invitation from the military junta to attend the official memorial to her father, party and government sources said.

''The regime sent some officials to her house about a week ago to invite her to the ceremony and she seems to have rejected it,'' a senior NLD member told Reuters.

Since returning to Myanmar in 1988, the Martyrs' Day ceremony has been the only official function Suu Kyi has attended, apart from the times she has been under arrest.

Aung San was gunned down along with several members of his would-be cabinet in 1947, six months before what was then called Burma won full independence from Britain.

The army has been in charge in one form or another since a 1962 coup. Suu Kyi's party won a crushing landslide in a 1990 general election, but the military junta refused to accept the result.

REUTERS DKS BST1402