100,000 missing people in the records in Thailand

January 23rd, 2006 by admin

‘Huge number of unidentified bodies’ in Thailand

By Nirmal Ghosh
The Straits Times
Publication Date : 2006-01-23

There may be as many as 100,000 missing people in the records in Thailand accumulated over the past several years, celebrity forensic scientist Porntip Rojanasunan believes.

“I do not know the exact number. But just in our area, four provinces, every year we have around 300 unidentified bodies,” said Dr Porntip, who is based at the Ministry of Justice’s office in Nonthaburi on the outskirts of Bangkok.

“In Pattani, in only one year, there were 300,” Dr Porntip said, adding that so far, she had received little political support or cooperation from the police in bringing modern forensic science techniques to crime investigation in the south.

In a project linked to the search for missing Muslim human rights lawyer Somchai Neelaphaijit, Dr Porntip will soon start taking DNA samples from 300 bodies in one Chinese cemetery in Pattani.

Somchai was abducted in March 2004 and has never been found. One police officer accused of involvement in his abduction was sentenced to four years in prison this month, with three other officers acquitted.

In the absence of evidence that Somchai had been killed, the charges were minor, leading analysts to decry the probe as half-hearted.

But shortly after the trial, Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said publicly that government officials had abducted the lawyer, and that he had been killed.

Dr Porntip explained in an interview: “Even if we know where the missing lawyer disappeared, we have no power to investigate.

“So we started with this project in southern Thailand and found that in Pattani alone, there were 300 unidentified remains in one year, 80 per cent homicides, and the police told the ministry almost all may be illegal Myanmar or Cambodian immigrants.”

There were about 20 unidentified Muslim bodies in a different cemetery, she said, not including unidentified bodies buried after the Kru Se incident of April 2004 in which several local Muslims were killed in a clash with security forces.

But her investigation would start with the 300 in the Chinese cemetery.

Dr Porntip, who in 2004 was conferred the prestigious royal title Khunying, told The Straits Times that her work had been delayed by objections from the police, who had generally hampered efforts to bring proper case investigation methods to the troubled southern provinces.

More than 1,000 people have been killed in two years in Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat in almost daily violence related to an insurgency movement often allied with criminal networks.

Thailand’s police regularly resort to extra-judicial killings, human rights watchdogs have long been saying.

Steeped in their male chauvinistic culture and jealously guarding their turf, top police officers have repeatedly gone public with their criticism of the celebrity forensic scientist, who has written books on her crime-busting exploits.

Dr Porntip said she agreed with assessments by international and local human rights observers of a “culture of impunity” among police and the authorities in Thailand.

She also agreed that proper investigations were not carried out on crimes in the southern provinces. While she had set up a unit in Pattani to investigate incidents in the south, it could only do so if the police asked it to.

In addition, her team lacked sufficient staff, which compounded the problem, she said.

“We cannot visit every crime scene. And in the south, we need well-trained people,” she said. “In each case, only local police officers investigate, and only in big cases which make the front pages do the seniors help.

“Some of the government officers use powers in the wrong way, so they do not want a good team to look at the evidence.”