YANGON - Protesters against last week's military coup in Myanmar swelled into the hundreds of thousands on Tuesday, with police firing warning shots and rubber bullets, and some injuries reported including a young woman in critical condition after being shot in the head.
Protests in the capital Naypyitaw, in the largest city Yangon and in the second-largest one Mandalay continued for a fourth day in defiance of bans on gatherings of more than four people.
The Naypyitaw Government Hospital received two protesters with bullet wounds, one with a terminal injury to the head and the other hit in the chest but in less serious condition, an anonymous doctor there told local media.
The doctor said the head trauma patient was on life support without long to live, while the other's injury is not life-threatening.
"Higher authorities have pressured us to transfer the patients to a military hospital. But senior doctors at our hospital have refused," he said.
Local journalists at the scene said the terminal patient is a student and a member of a local social support association in Naypyitaw who had only come to observe the goings-on, not to protest.
The police also used water cannon against protesters in Naypyitaw, Mandalay and Bago.
In Yangon, demonstrations were held in front of the headquarters of the formerly ruling National League for Democracy, whose leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been detained, and other locations in the center of the city.
Myanmar authorities on Tuesday searched the NLD headquarters in Yangon.
With people from the city's outskirts joining the protests, police closed bridges early Tuesday, according to local media. But traffic was later allowed to resume, enabling protesters shouting "We want democracy!" to cross the bridges, some accepting rides on trucks.
A 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. curfew has been imposed in Yangon, Mandalay, Naypyitaw, Bago and elsewhere in the country, as authorities cited threats to public security, the rule of law and stability.
As the clock hit 8 p.m. in Yangon, many residents banged cooking pots and pans outside their windows, as they have been doing since the subtle protest movement began spreading via social media one day after the Feb. 1 coup.
According to Reuters, at least 27 people including journalists were detained by local police in Mandalay.
On Monday, an estimated 100,000 people protested nationwide, the most since a 2007 uprising against military rule.
The military launched the coup after rejecting the results of last November's general election, which Suu Kyi's NLD won by a landslide, defeating the military-backed opposition party.
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