The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Danger in paradise
The seemingly idyllic Thai island of Koh Tao has for some families become the setting for a nightmare come to life. How did their holidaymaking children come to die there? Who is responsible? And why have police investigations left them with more question
Nicola Smith reports on a string of tragic deaths on the beautiful Thai island of Koh Tao – where holidaymakers flock, but may not be safe
It was 4am when the phone started ringing. In bed at her home in Surrey, Pat Harrington woke up, fear already tying a knot in her stomach. ‘Mum, it’s me,’ said a faint voice.
‘Mark? What’s happened? What’s wrong?’ It was August 2012, and only a few days earlier, Harrington had waved off her two sons, Ben, 32, and Mark, 28, as they left for a trip of a lifetime to the southern islands of Thailand. ‘Where’s Ben?’
Mark started sobbing. ‘Ben’s dead, Mum. He was on a bike, I don’t know what happened. The police say he hit an electricity pylon.’
Harrington cannot remember what she said next. The days and weeks that followed are still a blur, but the facts as recorded by the Thai police state that Ben had left the villa he was sharing with Mark on the island of Koh Tao on a rented motorcycle, heading for the bars lining the popular Sairee Beach. Two hours later, at 12.30am on 30 August, he was found dead, lying in a ditch.
If there had been a proper police investigation then Ben’s family, while heartbroken, could have perhaps come to terms with the death. But the investigation, if one can call it that, broke almost every rule in the book. The officers took no photographs of the scene and have no record of who found the body. The family have never seen proof that Ben’s motorbike collided with an electricity pylon and, although a Thai post-mortem claimed his head had turned towards his back, a second autopsy, carried out in Britain, contradicted this finding and said Ben had died from blunt trauma to his chest and a ruptured aorta.
‘I am not going to [record] an accident because I don’t feel I have got sufficient evidence to be satisfied it definitely was an accident,’ explained Penelope Schofield, senior coroner for West Sussex.
Crucially, the police have never provided a satisfactory explanation as to why Ben’s wallet and watch were missing.
‘We have been told that there are people who go down these dark roads and use wire and when bikes come along, they just trip them up, mug them and run off,’ says Harrington.
Despite these rumours, the police were quick to write the case off as a simple traffic accident, and just after Ben’s death, while Mark was still in shock, they did nothing to comfort him – he even recalls them cracking jokes among themselves. The police also put Mark under pressure to cremate Ben’s body immediately, in Thailand.
When he told his mother by phone, she was frantic. ‘I just shouted, “You do not let them touch him!”’ she says.
Six years later, Pat Harrington, a nurse, has given up any hope of ever finding out what really happened that night. But what is most disturbing about her quest for information is the number of other unexplained deaths that have taken place on the apparently idyllic island of Koh Tao, and in other destinations in Thailand popular with British holidaymakers and gap-year students.
One million Britons a year now visit Thailand. But according to figures issued by the Foreign Office, between 2014 and 2016, 1,151 British nation-
als died there. In 2015/16, Thailand was second only to Spain in the number of British deaths, though in that year Britons made 30 times more visits to Spain. Many of the deaths have been from illness or accidents, but there have been a string of fatalities whose causes have never been explained.
Individually they could be written off as tragic misadventures, but together they begin to point towards a pattern of criminal behaviour, botched detective work and even cover-ups by the police, seemingly under orders to preserve Thailand’s reputation for palm-fringed beaches, turquoise seas and hedonistic Full Moon parties.
An online petition Harrington started, urging the British Government to investigate these suspicious deaths, has so far garnered more than 14,000 signatures, and Harrington herself is now working closely with the parents of several other young victims to campaign for justice, publicise the dangers in Thailand and prevent other families from experiencing the same loss and pain.
Crispin Blunt – the Conservative MP for Reigate in Surrey, and former chair of the House of Commons’ Foreign Affairs Committee – is championing her push to investigate British deaths and corruption within Thailand’s police force, including the possibility that officers have been colluding with criminals over the deaths of ‘vulnerable foreigners’.
‘[The Foreign Office] needs to talk to other Western missions in Thailand to see what patterns they’re getting,’ he says. ‘I think it warrants proper investigation. And plainly, the Thai authorities are not going to want any focus on this because it’s going to put their tourism industry at risk.’
If a pattern is established then tourists, and particularly unseasoned gap-year travellers, should be warned by official travel advice, he goes on. ‘I don’t imagine that it would hit the threshold of saying, “Don’t go to Thailand,” but you could say, “Look out – it’s not as safe as you might think it is.”’
One of the most high-profile signatories to Harrington’s petition is Laura Witheridge, the sister of Hannah Witheridge, a student from Norfolk who was brutally murdered together with engineering graduate David Miller on Koh Tao in September 2014. Bludgeoned to death after meeting each other on the island, Hannah and David were 23 and 24 years old respectively, and their deaths made headlines around the world. The police on Koh Tao, under enormous pressure to solve the crime, arrested two Burmese migrant workers, who were subsequently tried and sentenced to death.
But serious doubts now surround the investigation. The petition is also peppered with signatories pleading for justice for the migrant workers, Zaw Lin and Wai Phyo, who have retracted
‘The authorities are not going to want any focus on this because it’s going to put tourism at risk’
their initial confessions, claiming they were tortured by the police. They now languish on death row, awaiting the verdict of a Supreme Court appeal. To admit that there were flaws in the investigation is extraordinarily painful for relatives, but a mounting body of evidence suggests that flaws do exist.
In particular, there are major questions over the DNA evidence that was presented to the court. At the trial, in 2015, the prosecution alleged that DNA taken from the accused matched samples recovered from Hannah’s body. (She was raped before being murdered.) But the legal team spearheading Lin and Phyo’s appeal say the collection of that DNA did not meet international standards – or come anywhere close.
Dr Pornthip Rojanasunand, a Thai forensic scientist, has testified that the crime scene was not protected. And when her laboratory tested the alleged murder weapon, a garden hoe used to rake the sand on the beach where the murders were committed, it found no DNA from either of the accused men.
‘The issue is the whole collection process,’ says Andy Hall, a British human-rights activist and advisor to the defence team. ‘There was no chain of custody presented to the court to support the forensics investigation and analysis.’ For that reason the whole forensics collection, analysis and reporting process was ‘unreliable’ and should be dismissed, he adds.
David’s parents and brother attended the original trial and issued a powerful statement saying justice had been done; the Witheridges made no formal comment. But Laura later issued a scath-
ing attack on the Thai police for a ‘bungled’ investigation. She warned on Facebook that Thailand was a ‘dangerous trap’, claimed she had received death threats, and accused the Thai authorities of ‘covering up’ the killings of other Western tourists on Koh Tao.
Among the deaths in Thailand that are still unexplained are those of: Luke Miller, 26, from the Isle of Wight, who was found dead at the bottom of a swimming pool at a bar on Sairee Beach in 2016; Nick Pearson, 25, from Derby, who was found floating in the sea off Koh Tao on New Year’s Day 2014; and Elise Dallemagne, 30, from Belgium, and Michael White, 27, from Southampton, both of whose parents contest police reports that their children committed suicide. The official account of death by suicide has also been questioned in the case of Dimitri Povse, 29, from France.
On Koh Tao in particular, a malevolent atmosphere has spread across an island formerly known for its laid-back vibe and abundant marine life. Ex-residents speak privately about a local mafia that runs the island with an iron fist, picking off tourists at will, protected by members of the police force. And such lurid allegations are not uncommon in Thailand. It may have a reputation as a tourists’ paradise, but it is politically troubled, ruled by a military junta that took over in 2014, and some civil rights have been suspended.
Freedom of speech and press freedoms have been curtailed, and the country – including the police and the judiciary – is riddled with corruption and abuses of power. In the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, Thailand comes a miserable 71st out of 113 countries, below Burkina Faso and only one place above Colombia.
‘Justice is elusive for the victims of human-rights violations allegedly committed by police,’ explains Katherine Gerson, a South East Asia campaigner for Amnesty International. ‘Their families face significant obstacles in seeking redress, including compromised investigations, mishandling of evidence, intimidation and threats.’
When Nick Pearson’s brother Matt fell to his knees crying over Nick’s death, he was comforted by a European resident of Koh Tao who also warned him not to make a fuss, implying that ‘horrible things happen to people’ who do. The Pearsons, though, did make a fuss, contesting police claims that Nick, who was holidaying with his family, had fallen from a 50ft cliff outside his hotel room in a drunken accident. A 4ft-high rock blocking the cliff edge made it impossible to fall accidentally, says his mother, Tracy. ‘He could not have fallen over that rock,’ she insists.
Once again, a British coroner recorded an open verdict, while a pathologist noted many injuries to Nick’s head, limbs and face, saying that although many of these would have been sustained before Nick’s death, he could not rule out the possibility of an assault.
‘Ideally all these cases should be taken apart and the truth needs to be found, but realistically I’m not sure that’s possible. So I think we need to just stay away from Thailand,’ says Andrea Whitaker, whose son Liam, an engineering graduate, died in police custody in Bangkok in 2013.
Royal Thai Police, the foreign ministry, the Koh Tao police and the mayor’s office did not respond to Telegraph enquiries. A spokesperson for the Foreign Office said the travel advice for Thailand was ‘under constant review’.
Sara Cotton, the mother of Luke Miller, still keeps his car outside her home and his clothes in the drawers in his bedroom. ‘I don’t want him to go anywhere,’ she says. ‘He was 26 years old, with his whole life ahead of him. I can’t let go.’
The families who have signed Pat Harrington’s petition, facing a wall of scepticism, accept that they will probbably never learn the truth about their children’s deaths. But as Andrea Whitaker says, ‘When young people go to Thailand, they have no idea what they are walking into. They should be warned.’
Ex-residents speak privately about a local mafia that runs the island with an iron fist