Myanmar on Wednesday freed 44 political detainees, a presidential adviser said, the latest in a series of prisoner amnesties by the country's reformist regime.

"In total 44 political prisoners have been released around the country today," Hla Maung Shwe told Agence France Presse.

Seven people were killed after a fire broke out at a department store on the outskirts of Yangon due to a suspected electrical fault, a fire department official said Tuesday.

"Seven people -- four men and three women -- were killed in the fire," the official told Agence France Presse on condition of anonymity, adding that goods worth some $5,000 had been destroyed in the blaze.

International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde urged Myanmar -- which is enjoying an economic boom after decades of international isolation under the junta -- to urgently prioritize tackling widespread poverty.

"As Myanmar opens up and expands, it needs the structural foundations of a modern economy. This is an urgent priority," she said in a speech to students at the Yangon Institute of Economics.

An Indonesian court Wednesday jailed 14 Muslim Rohingya men from Myanmar for nine months each for bludgeoning eight Buddhists from their country to death in an Indonesian detention center.

The Rohingya asylum-seekers in April killed the Buddhist men, who had been detained for illegally fishing in Indonesian waters, as sectarian tensions in their home country flared.

A European Union humanitarian envoy on Saturday voiced concern at the "dramatic deprivation" in Myanmar's camps for tens of thousands of people, mainly Muslims, made homeless by deadly unrest in Rakhine State.

Violence in Rakhine last year killed scores and displaced 140,000 people -- many from the stateless Rohingya Muslim minority -- prompting international concern about the state, which is now virtually segregated on religious lines.

Myanmar said Thursday it will not grant citizenship to Muslims identifying themselves as Rohingya, despite renewed pressure by the United Nations which describes the stateless minority as among the world's most persecuted.

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya are estimated to live in Myanmar, mostly in western Rakhine state, which has been rocked by several bouts of deadly sectarian violence.

Myanmar on Friday said it had released dozens of jailed dissidents, as the fast-changing former pariah state hosts top-level international visitors, including from the European Union.

The country pardoned 69 inmates, the latest in a series of releases that have been seen internationally as a key marker of its emergence from military rule.

The alleged mastermind of a plot to bomb the Myanmar embassy in Indonesia led a group of Islamic extremists intent on avenging the "massacre" of Rohingya Muslims, a court heard Wednesday.

Sigit Indrajid, 23, is the fourth person to go on trial this week over the plan to attack the mission in Jakarta in May and could face the death penalty if found guilty.

Around 300 Buddhist monks marched through Yangon Tuesday in protest at a looming visit by delegates from the world's top Islamic body to Myanmar, which has been rattled by several bouts of anti-Muslim violence.

A delegation from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) will meet with Muslims and Buddhists during their stay later this week, according to a senior official.

The United Nations has hailed peace talks between Myanmar's government and armed ethnic minority groups as a "significant move" towards ending decades of civil war in the former junta-ruled nation.

The meeting in the conflict-torn northern state of Kachin on November 4-5 was the first for decades between a combined group of ethnic representatives and government negotiators on home soil.