Yangon - Three staff members of the US House of Representatives Foreign Relations Committee met Friday with leaders of Myanmar's main opposition party.

"They wanted to know the political situation of Myanmar and also the health of the political prisoners, including the condition of Daw [Madame] Aung San Suu Kyi," National League for Democracy (NLD) spokesman Nyan Win said after meeting with the three Americans, Lynne Weil, Jessica Lee and Dennis Halpin.

A US embassy official in Yangon denied that the trip was a follow-up to this month's visit of US Senator Jim Webb in which he secured the freedom of American national John William Yettaw.

Webb, chairman of the US Senate's East Asia and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee, persuaded Myanmar's ruling military junta to free Yettaw, who had been sentenced to seven years in jail for an unauthorized swim to the Yangon lakeside home of NLD leader Suu Kyi on May 3, staying uninvited until May 5.

The bizarre adventure, supposedly to warn Suu Kyi of a vision Yettaw had had in which he had seen her assassinated, provided the junta with a pretext to charge Suu Kyi, who has spent 14 of the past 20 year under detention, with breaking the terms of her house detention.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner herself was sentenced to three years in jail over Yettaw's visit, later commuted to 18 months under house detention in her family compound, the same one Yettaw visited.

Webb, known to be close to US President Barack Obama, is an advocate of US "re-engagement" with Asia and has called for a reassessment of US policy toward Myanmar.

The United States has imposed economic sanctions on Myanmar since 1988 and forbade American companies from doing business with the pariah state as of 1991. (dpa)