Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, freed from housearrest 10 days ago, was reunited with her younger son on Tuesday after about 10 years apart, an AFP reporter witnessed.
Kim Aris, 33, who lives in Britain, arrived on a flight from Bangkok to Yangon airport, where his 65-year-old mother was waiting to meet him. She was freed on November 13 after more than seven consecutive years in detention.
"I'm very glad and I'm very happy," Ms Suu Kyi told AFP after the reunion.
On greeting his smiling mother, Aris immediately took off his outer shirt to show her symbols of the National League for Democracy (NLD), her political party, tattoed on his arm, the reporter witnessed.
Aris had arrived in the Thai capital a few days ahead of his mother's release but faced a prolonged wait for a visa to the military-ruled country, where Ms Suu Kyi had been locked up for 15 of the past 21 years.
During her detention in her lakeside home in Yangon, Ms Suu Kyi had no telephone or Internet access and only limited contact with the outside world. It has been about a decade since she last saw Aris or her elder son Alexander.
The daughter of Burma’s assassinated independence hero General Aung San was released less than a week after an election dismissed by many as a sham for cementing the military regime's decades-long grip on power.
When her freedom was granted, crowds of jubilant supporters gathered outside her home to glimpse the charismatic dissident, seen by many as the best hope for democratic change after almost five decades of Army rule.