Yangon:
Myanmar has issued a passport to opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, her party said on Tuesday, as the former political prisoner prepares to travel abroad for the first time in 24 years.
The 66-year-old democracy icon, who spent much of the last two decades locked up in her Yangon home by Myanmar's former junta, plans to visit Oslo next month to finally accept her 1991 Nobel Peace Prize in person.
"We were informed on Friday that Daw Suu got her passport. Her passport is in her hand now," said Nyan Win, spokesman for the veteran activist's National League for Democracy (NLD) party. Daw is a term of respect in Myanmar.
Suu Kyi began applying for her Myanmar travel documents soon after she was elected to Parliament in the landmark April 1 by-elections seen as a key test of reforms under the new quasi-civilian government.
Along with Norway, she also intends to travel to Britain, where she lived for years with her late husband and their two sons before she returned to Myanmar in the late 1980s.
Nyan Win said that the trip would go ahead in mid-June as previously expected.
Suu Kyi, the daughter of Myanmar's independence hero General Aung San, was thrust into the limelight as protests broke out against the junta while she was visiting her homeland to care for her sick mother in 1988.
She has not set foot outside Myanmar since, fearing that the generals who ruled the nation for decades would prevent her from returning.