Suspicion grows that executed Thai was scapegoat

Despite the self- congratulatory live coverage provided by Chinese state television of the last moments of convicted Mekong River pirate Naw Kham before he was executed by lethal injection, that is not the end of the matter.

Naw Kham and three of his accomplices were executed on March 1 for the killing of 13 Chinese sailors on two cargo boats plying the Mekong River in the Golden Triangle region between Laos, Burma and Thailand on Oct. 5, 2011.

The murders provoked much public anger in China and the Beijing authorities made a great public display of sending security teams to Thailand, Burma and Laos, where they eventually captured Naw Kham and his gang.

The pirates were extradited to Kunming, the capital of China’s southwestern Yunnan province, and subjected to a show trial before their executions.

But there are still nine Thai soldiers, members of an elite anti- drug and border patrol special forces group known as the Pha Muang Task Force ( PMTF), awaiting trial on charges that they colluded with Naw Kham in the attack on the two cargo boats, the Hua Ping and the Yu Xing 8.

The nine, including two commissioned officers, are also charged with murdering the 13 Chinese crew members.

Indeed, there’s a significant group of Thai officials and others who believe the attack on the two boats and the killings were entirely the work of the Thai PMTF men.

Naw Kham, says this argument, was simply an obvious scapegoat because of his history of operating as a pirate and hostage- taker from his Mekong River island haven of Sam Puu. Naw Khan may be a pirate with a long history of involvement in drug trafficking out of Burma’s Shan state, goes this view, but he has no history of the kind of brutality meted out on the boats’ crews.

Naw Kham is not a reliable witness in his own defence, but there are reports he only pleaded guilty in his first trial last year in the belief this would spare him the death penalty.

When, on appeal in September, Naw Kham came to believe the Chinese intended to execute him, he changed his plea to not guilty.

In court Naw Kham said “The crime was carried out by the Thais. I only got to know about it through television.”

And despite the Chinese authorities’ attempt to portray their response as justifiable judicial vengeance for the murder of innocent Chinese, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the crews of the two boats were engaged in the smuggling into Thailand of massive amounts of the highly addictive methamphetamine drug known as Yaa Baa ( crazy medicine).

In all nearly one million Yaa Baa tablets with a street value of about $ 6 million were found on the two cargo boats, together with the bound and shot body of one of the captains.

Over the next few days the bodies of the other 12 crew members, including two women cooks, were found in the Mekong. Most had their hands bound behind their backs and had been gagged with duct tape before being shot through the head.

From the start the finger of suspicion pointed at the PMTF, which has an effective intelligence network about the movement of drugs out of Shan state in Burma where they are manufactured.

The PMTF also has a history of making clandestine forays into the countries neighbouring Thailand.

The suspicion hardened that the PMTF had hijacked the drug shipment, left enough Yaa Baa on the boats to be convincing and killed the witnesses — the crews — when forensic tests showed it was Thai army rifles that had killed the crews, not the guns used by Naw Kham’s men.

And last year a Thai parliament committee which looked into the case concluded “Circumstantial evidence suggests that Thai officials were involved in the sailors’ deaths. However, their motive, and whether it is connected to the drugs found on the ships, remains inconclusive.”

There is no timetable for the court hearing of the charges against the nine soldiers, and some suspect the matter may be allowed to sink into oblivion.

But the case may not be allowed to disappear because there is a sharp political divide between the Thai police and the Thai army. The police have been doggedly pursuing the investigation.

The current rift between the police and the army is a reflection of the cleft in Thai politics since 2006 when Royalist army officers mounted a coup against the Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

Thaksin was a police officer before launching a communications business that made him Thailand’s richest man and a successful politicians. He is in exile, but with the return of democracy, the prime minister is now his sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, who like her brother is very popular with the police.