CHICAGO — American John Yettaw said Wednesday that he has no regrets about taking a secret swim to the home of Myanmar’s detained democracy leader — a decision that landed them both in prison — and indicated that he still believes his bizarre visit somehow saved her from being assassinated.
“If I had to do it again, I would do it a hundred times, a hundred times, to save her life,” an exhausted-looking Yettaw said of Aung San Suu Kyi in an interview with The Associated Press after arriving in the U.S. on Wednesday.
He added, “That they locked her up, it just breaks my heart.”
Yettaw, 53, was wearing a blue surgical mask and clutching a Harrods bag as he was pushed in a wheelchair through Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport after his arrival. Yettaw, who has been ill since his arrest in Myanmar, wore the mask to guard against infection.
Yettaw, from the tiny south-central Missouri town of Falcon, generated global headlines after he was arrested and sentenced to hard labor for visiting the home of Suu Kyi. Yettaw was deported Sunday from Myanmar after the intervention of U.S. Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va.
Yettaw has testified that he swam to the Nobel Laureate’s house in May to warn her that he’d had a “vision” that she would be assassinated. Though Yettaw was released, Suu Kyi and her two live-in aides remain in detention because of Yettaw’s visit, and Yettaw has been called a fool and a madman by some of her supporters.
