Miss Grand Myanmar Han Lay hit the headlines last week as she spoke out last week against alleged atrocities committed by her country's military.
"Today in my country Myanmar … there are so many people dying," she said at the Miss Grand International 2020 event in Thailand. "Please help Myanmar. We need your urgent international help right now."
Han Lay, a psychology student at the University of Yangon, decided to use the pageant as a platform to speak out about her homeland on an international stage.
"In Myanmar, journalists are detained … so I decided to speak out," she told the BBC in a phone interview from Bangkok.
She is concerned now that her two-minute speech could have put her on the radar of the military. She said she had decided to stay put in Thailand for at least the next three months, the BBC report said.
A little over a month ago, Han Lay, who is 22, was on the streets of Yangon, Myanmar's largest city, protesting against the military.
The unrest in Myanmar began two months ago when the military seized control of the country, undoing a democratic election in which Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party won by a landslide.
According to the latest media reports, Myanmar security forces killed over 80 anti-coup protesters in Bago town on Thursday night and Friday, near the main city of Yangon, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) monitoring group and a domestic news outlet said.
Troops used rifle grenades to break up a protest in the town, witnesses and domestic media said. AAPP and the Myanmar Now news portal said 82 people were killed.
