Andrew Drummond

on August 17, 2008

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From Andrew Drummond, Bangkok
16th August 2008

Pictures by Andrew Chant

A British man who faced a seven-year prison sentence in the Philippines for adultery is being allowed to return to the UK with his girlfriend and baby this week.

David Scott, 37, has had his application for partner Cynthia Delfino to accompany him granted by the Home Office on humanitarian grounds.

The couple’s daughter Janina has been given British citizenship following her parents’ ordeal, which began when they were arrested and flung into a squalid cell in Manila when Cynthia was eight months pregnant.

They were charged with adultery, which is illegal in the strictly Catholic Philippines, despite Cynthia having separated from her husband.

After four days the couple were bailed and they fled to live in a jungle and derelict houses before Janina, now seven months old, was born in a tiny clinic.

David, from Swindon, Wiltshire - who met Cynthia on the internet in 2006 - paid £12,000 in legal fees and bribes to get them to Thailand.

After the long and emotional journey, they picked up Cynthia’s visa from the British embassy in Bangkok last week.

David said: ‘It’s been a long fight having to pay bribes everywhere I go. But every time I look at my daughter I just know it was worth everything.’

Cynthia said: ‘I am so relieved. I am a little scared about going to Britain, but everybody is so kind.’

Coming home at lastFrom Andrew Drummond,
Koh Samet, Thailand
Saturday August 16 08
In the sea off the Thai island of Koh Samet David Scott takes his first ever dip with is new born baby and Filipina wife.
He has been in the tropics for nine months but has not even seen so much as a swimming pool in an ordeal which began with his arrest and jailing in the Philippines for adultery and a threatened sentence of seven years.
But yesterday David Scott, 37, his girlfriend Cynthia, 28, and baby Janina, seven months finally found time to celebrate after learning that the Home Office had granted them permission on humanitarian grounds for the whole family to return to Britain.
David and Cynthia are on the run after escaping from Philippines Police. A court official in Coolocan, Manila, confirmed last week that a warrant had been issued for their arrest or adultery.
This week they will be flying back to Swindon, Wilts, where Scott will introduce his new born baby to his grandmother.
Said David: “If it had not been for you guys (the Mail on Sunday) and my local M.P. Anne Snelgrove, I have no idea where I would be now, but probably in jail or worse. I cannot thank you enough.”
David Scott, 37, from Swindon, Wilts., spent last New Year in jail in Manila, after he was arrested with 8 month pregnant Cynthia Delfino, during a night-time swoop by Philippines police and officers of the National Bureau of Investigation.
Accompanying the police was Cynthia’s Filipino husband Noriel Delfino, who was demanding the couple be jailed for the maximum seven years in the Philippines for adultery unless they paid him the equivalent of £7,000.
There is no divorce in the Philippines, a strictly Catholic country, but rich families can seek costly annulments on the grounds of the mental incapacity of one of the partners.
The couple were thrown into a police cell and that’s when how they spent last New Year. They even had to bribe police to be allowed to share a cell.
The couple fled while on bail and were forced to live in the jungle, derelict houses, and finally a room provided by friends, before their baby girl Janina was born in secret in a tiny clinic south of Manila.
All in all David Scott had to legal fees and bribes over £12,000 using his savings and finally cash sent by his mum and friends in Britain, to pay for documentation for Janina and his wife and get smuggle them out of the country.
Although the warrant was out for their arrest, they were able to board a flight to Bangkok, Thailand.
“The Immigration policeman took my last £25,” said David.
Back in Thailand journalists chipped in and provide food and accommodation for the family for four months while David attempted the hardest - part to get them all home to Britain.
With the help of local M.P. Anne Snelgrove, Mr. Scott was able to get British citizenship for baby Janina in Bangkok a month ago, and this week an official from the British Embassy in Bangkok informed David the Cynthia’s application to travel with her baby to England was granted on humanitarian grounds.
On the holiday island of Koh Samet, 150 miles south east of Bangkok David Scott said: “When I flew to the Philippines to visit Cynthia for the birth of our baby her husband had already agreed to go through an annulment. But I walked into a trap. It’s been a long fight having to pay bribes every where I go. But every time I look at my daughter I just know it was worth everything.
“I have learned a lot from this trip. The biggest lesson of all is that one is not automatically going to get help or even just advice from a British Embassy if one gets into trouble. You are very much on your own.
“The first advice I got from an Embassy official in Manila was that legally Janina was not my baby and I should leave the country without her.
(Technically as there is no divorce in the Philippines the government would recognise Janina as being the daughter of Noriel Delfino).
“That’s not the sort of advice one forgets. Then when I got to Bangkok they would not even let me and Janina into the Embassy – until my M.P. called them – all because we had ticked the wrong box on a visa form.
(Cynthia has been given a visa even though technically she is still married to Noriel Delfino and has known David under the statutory two years. Thus they were not even allowed to join the visa queue).
Said Cynthia: “I am so relieved. I am a little scared about going to Britain but everybody has been so kind so far.”

Bar girl and the expat: a killing foretold - Observer 17 Aug 08

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on August 17, 2008

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Every year hundreds of Britons leave the UK to marry Thai brides. The perils of such liaisons were revealed last week when retired engineer Ian Beeston was murdered by his wife and her lover. Ian MacKinnon and Andrew Drummond in Suwannaphum investigate a ruthless marriage market in which money can buy beauty but not necessarily love.

Ian MacKinnon and Andrew Drummond

The Observer, Sunday August 17 2008

Andrew Herrington, a retired Birmingham lorry driver who now lives in Thailand, lowered his voice and turned to his companions: ‘Well, you know, he married a bar girl. What did he expect?’

Sitting on the ground floor of his home - a two-storey house squatting in a rice paddy in Isan, north-east Thailand - Herrington, aged 51, was talking about his friend and neighbour, Ian Beeston, who was found murdered last weekend after predicting that his Thai wife would kill him.

Beeston, 69, a retired design engineer, had been beaten and stabbed in his house - police say he took seven hours to die. His wife, Wacheerawan, 42, and her Thai lover, Somchit Janong, 48, confessed and have been charged with murder. In bizarre and macabre fashion, Janong even re-enacted for police and photographers the manner in which he had clubbed Beeston to death.

This was no isolated romance that culminated in a tragedy. The British embassy in Bangkok processes the wedding documents of up to 70 couples each week. The requests are almost exclusively from older British men - among 860,000 UK tourists each year - hoping to marry younger Thai women. But for any British man hoping to follow in Beeston’s footsteps and build a new better life in Thailand, his death was a stark reminder of how badly things can go wrong.

Three of the group of worried farangs - the Thai term for foreigners - who had gathered in Isan, have invested a hefty chunk of their life’s savings building houses nearby on the fringes of Suwannaphum village, deep in Thailand’s poorest province, Roi Et. Beeston’s house, which swallowed up all of his £250,000 retirement nest egg, was described locally as ‘palatial’. Unsurprisingly, in the wake of the killing, a siege mentality has taken hold.

‘Wanna’ was indeed a bar girl, a prostitute. She met Beeston in a bar in Beach Road, Soi 2, in Pattaya, the garish beach resort in southern Thailand, when he was still coming to the country on holiday. The resort is notorious for go-go and hostess bars with a ’sin city’ reputation that surpasses that of Bangkok. Eventually, his marriage having fallen apart, Beeston took early retirement from his job at the Ford motor plant in Dagenham, Essex, and moved to Thailand. In 1999 he married Wanna and paid for her two grown-up children to be put through university.

The good life hit the buffers when he discovered Wanna had secretly sold his Suwannaphum property. As foreigners are barred from owning land in Thailand, he had put everything in her name. All his savings from working as a design engineer, first at Perkins and then at Ford, had gone. Worse, the new owners of his house were agitating to move in. Four months ago a furious Beeston banished Wanna to a corrugated shack in the back garden. Friends feared then that he had signed his own death warrant.

In a letter left with lawyers, Beeston predicted his own grisly fate. ‘It is just a matter of time now,’ he wrote. ‘I am in real fear for my own life.’

Beeston’s romance, like so many others involving Western men escaping loneliness at home, began with a stroll down one of the hundreds of neon-lit strips in Thailand’s tourist-friendly sex quarters. The ratio of male tourists to Thai women is almost two to one. Walk down Bangkok’s Soi Cowboy or Patpong any evening and it is easy to see how masculine fantasy can take flight. Ageing, unprepossessing foreign men are fawned over by lithe young Thai women wearing broad smiles and revealing clothes. The prospective clients are beckoned through curtained doorways to a dimly lit world where bar girls dance suggestively on a tiny stage and strip.

Others chat up the punters in rudimentary English. The price of all this attention is just the cost of a drink for the girl, perhaps a tip. The often unspoken element is that the girl will go back and spend the night at his hotel. Cash is rarely mentioned, and there is no unseemly haggling, but the going rate is little more than a ‘present’ of £20.

‘[The men] are often not the most handsome of all, they are usually in the latter years of their life, they are bald, unattractive and quite lonely in their own little society,’ writes Thai anthropologist Dr Yos Santasombat in Hello My Big Big Honey!, an anthology of love letters penned to Bangkok bar girls. ‘When they come to Patpong, they’re struck with girls who are all over them.’

The appeal of easy, cheap sex is evident the next morning. The same men hold hands with their bar girls skipping down the pavements of Bangkok’s tourist haunts. ‘Often they extend their relationship for a number of days or weeks or even years,’ writes Yos. ‘Sometimes the farang himself ends up spending the entire vacation with one girl and sometimes comes back. Sometimes she becomes his mistress or even a wife.’

Romance with a Westerner in such circumstances can come perilously close to a game of mutual exploitation. Nearly all of the girls have flocked to the cities and resorts to escape their own prison: an impoverished existence in Thailand’s rural expanses, whereas a night’s takings from the city bar could sustain a family for a month. From Isan’s desperately poor, rice farming villages, where hunger is the norm, the bars of Bangkok or Pattaya are a welcome escape. For girls with little education they provide an opportunity to shine and have the honour of providing for their families by sending new-found riches back home.

‘They do it because it’s an easy life,’ said John Burdett, a British lawyer-turned-novelist who has interviewed hundreds of bar girls for books such as Bangkok Haunts. ‘You don’t want to be a subsistence rice farmer. It’s very, very hard. Village life’s claustrophobic. Bar girl work isn’t dirty. It’s not strenuous. They don’t have dozens of partners; maybe one or two a week. The rest of the time they’re getting men to buy drinks and existing on tips. In the village there’s a kind of omertà, where no one talks about it. But they send money home to care for people, so they’ve big status.

‘A bar girl in her early or mid-twenties has a 10-year window of opportunity to get out of poverty,’ said Burdett. ‘So if she spends time with a guy she is using up her chances. She sees that as an investment and she’s entitled to something in return. The car and the house may be in her name. In the West we’ve lost our intuitive understanding of how poverty shapes thinking. So, if after 10 years together the foreigner decides to move out, leaving her with little to show for it, that’s a problem. She’s lost face and that’s terribly important. Her image has been damaged and it might even lead people to kill.’

Stephen Treharne Jones, 63, (left) was a former neighbour of Beeston. Jones met Lamyai, then 32, in a Pattaya bar and sought to ‘rescue’ her and send her home to Isan. ‘When I met my wife, Lamyai , she had nothing,’ said Jones. ‘I paid her out of a sex bar in Pattaya and told her to go home. When I visited her home she was living in a room with her two children. There was no bathroom or toilet facilities, no doors, no tiles, no electricity, just a mattress and blankets on the floor. So I bought a big home for both of us and bought the land off her relatives.’

Jones’s world collapsed when he asked his wife to sell a piece of land he had bought. Lamyai refused, saying it was impossible. Only when he went with a lawyer to the land registry did he discover he never owned it. He bought it from Lamyai’s family, but allowed them to keep it in their names because of foreign ownership prohibitions. When challenged, Lamyai threw him out of their luxury villa in Kalasin, an hour from Suwannaphum. Penniless, he scuttled back to King’s Lynn, Norfolk, two months ago. He now lives there in sheltered accommodation.

‘Looking back now, I know my Thai wife had set me up from day one,’ said Jones last week. ‘In Kalasin I know of three other foreigners who were kicked out by their wives after they completed property purchases. They say there’s no fool like an old fool. But I did genuinely love Lamyai. I was sold a dream, I guess. A quiet life in the country where food and drink was cheap, the women attentive and the weather warm. But that’s not the reality. The reality is that one becomes a captive.’

Lamyai (right) has a very different account of the breakdown in relations. ‘If Stephen had been a good husband I would not have asked him to leave,’ she said. ‘But when he argued he called me a thief and a prostitute. We were quite happy for four years, even though he spent a lot of time going out drinking with his farang friends in the area. Stephen had a house he could have lived in all his life if he respected me as his wife, but at the end I was just his servant.’

As his own marriage became a bitter property dispute, Beeston saw trouble coming. Exiled to the garden shed, his wife had installed her lover, Janong, and they kept Beeston a virtual prisoner in his own home with taunts and attacks.

In a letter to his lawyers, Beeston told how his wife had started a money lending business - lending his money - and had paid off local police so she could run an illegal lottery. ‘My wife threatened me with a gun,’ he said in the letter, detailing a series of attacks on his house involving ’stones, lumps of wood, fireworks and even a tin of paint’. The house was also frequently burgled, he said.

Like so many Britons and other expatriates living in rural Thailand who are unable to converse in Thai, it appears Beeston may have been the unwitting victim of a sting his wife had been waiting for years to bring off. According to his friends, the whole town, even the police chief, knew but nobody said anything. ‘I thought she loved me, but she only wanted my money after all,’ Beeston had told his Australian neighbour, Bill Lamb.

‘He told me he thought his wife was about to kill him,’ said Lamb. ‘My feeling is that Ian had been paying for Wanna’s daughters from a previous marriage to go to university. This year they both graduated. I just don’t think he was needed any more. She had it all. To be honest - the life of a foreigner isn’t worth much around here.’

Back in Herrington’s Suwannaphum house, fists were clenched as the group discussed a fitting revenge for the perpetrators of the callous act. The palpable sentiment was: ‘It’s them or us.’ But the bitter consensus was also that after all the publicity had died down Beeston’s wife would be granted bail and freed. ‘She’s got the money, and with money cases just get dropped,’ said Herrington.

Then the conversation turned to the future and who was ‘next for the bullet’. They agree they know the identity of the marked man. He lives about 20 miles away and is having some major problems with his Thai wife. ‘Yep,’ they chorus, ‘for sure.’

About this articleClose Bar girl and the expat: a Thailand killing foretold
This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday August 17 2008 on p8 of the News section. It was last updated at 00:02 on August 17 2008.

Police to meet Gary Glitter in London - The Times Aug 14 08

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on August 14, 2008

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From Andrew Drummond,

Bangkok

Gary Glitter, the former rock star who was jailed for three years for abusing children in Vietnam would be deported back to Britain next, his lawyer said yesterday.

The statement appeared to contradict an earlier statement by lawyer Le Than Kinh that Glitter would be unaccompanied and free to go anywhere after leaving Vietnam.

But it is understood Glitter, real name Paul Francis Gadd, has been only provided with a one way travel document back to Britain, since his passport expired a year ago.

On his return to Britain it is understood that Gadd will be put on the paedophile register before being allowed to travel abroad again.

He has indicated in an interview with a Vietnamese journalist that he needed to seek medical and dental treatment in Britain as a matter of priority, although in that interview he said he would like to go to Singapore or Hong Kong where he had friends.

The Vietnamese Foreign Affairs department has politely declined work visas for foreign journalists intending to cover his release and asked that they respect Gadd’s wishes.

Le Than Kinh said last week that the fallen star, who had a cult following with songs such as ‘Leader of the Gang’ , would be escorted directly onto an aircraft by police and with a British official from the Consulate in Ho Chi Minh City.

He confirmed yesterday: “Police booked his ticket from Ho Chi Minh City to London and I have already paid for the ticket on his behalf.”

Glitter was arrested in the southern province of Baria-Vung Tau after journalists from a Sunday newspaper spotted and photographed him with young girls there.

A subsequent police investigation resulted in four charges of ‘lewdness with children’ aged 11 and 12, being brought against him.

An investigation into child rape was dropped after the parents of the two victims demanded US$10,000 and US$5,000 respectively.

Lawyer Le Than Kinh negotiated the compensation down to US$2000 each and the families then petitioned the People’s Court to stop the case in order ‘to avoid further damage to the girls’ families’ honour and to the privacy of the victims.

Since the offences the girls have been returned to the care of their parents, and of two older girls who procured the children for Gadd, one was now married and another has been sentenced and released from custody at the Baria-Vung Tau Social Labour Centre, a rehabilitation unit.

When Gadd was sentenced to three years in prison the Chief Prosecutor of the People’s Procuracy of Baria-Vung Tau noted that in 1999 he had been ‘taken into police custody for two months by British police on a charge of storage of forbidden sexual photographs in a laptop’ and that in 2003 he was expelled by police from Cambodia.

After he was sentenced officers from Scotland Yard visited Paul Gadd in prison in Vietnam and examined the hard disk of his computer which contained images of children involved in sexual activity. The case had not been proceeded with in Vietnam because Gadd claimed in his defence that he had borrowed the computer from a friend and there was no evidence that he intended to ‘widely propagate’ the material.

It is understood there is no plan to prosecute him in Britain for these offences.

Pictures: Andrew Chant

Jungle Brit gets Home Office permission to bring family home -Aug 14 08

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on August 14, 2008

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Jungle Brit gets permission to fly home with Filipina and baby

From Andrew Drummond, Bangkok, Wednesday August 14

A Briton who fled to the jungle in the Philippines after being told he faced seven years in jail there for adultery has been given leave to return to England with his girlfriend and seven month old baby.

David Scott, 37, from Swindon, Wilts., spent last New Year in jail in Manila, after he was arrested with his 8 month pregnant Filipina girlfriend Cynthia Delfino, 28, during a night-time swoop by Philippines police and officers of the National Bureau of Investigation.
Accompanying the police was Cynthia’s Filipino husband Noriel Delfino, who said David, was demanding the couple be jailed for the maximum seven years in the Philippines for adultery unless they paid him the equivalent of £7,000.
There is no divorce in the Philippines, a strictly Catholic country, but rich families can seek costly annulments on the grounds of the mental incapacity of one of the partners.
The couple fled while on bail and were forced to live in the jungle, derelict houses, and finally a room provided by friends, before their baby girl Janina was born in a tiny clinic south of Manila.
A warrant was issued for their arrest but by paying bribes they were able to board a flight to Bangkok, Thailand.
With the help of local M.P. Anne Snelgrove, Mr. Scott was able to get British citizenship for baby Janina in Bangkok a month ago, and early today an official from the British Embassy in Bangkok informed David the Cynthia’s application to travel with her baby to England was granted on humanitarian grounds.
In Bangkok David Scott said today: “Obviously we are both delighted. It’s been a nine month ordeal. We would like to thank our M.P. and journalists and everybody who helped us fight to get our baby home to Britain.

“When I flew to the Philippines to visit Cynthia for the birth of our baby her husband had already agreed to go through an annulment. But I walked into a trap. It’s been a long fight having to pay bribes every where I go. But every time I look at my daughter I just know it was worth everything.”
Said Cynthia: “I am so relieved. When the Embassy called this morning I just knew it was going to be good news. I am a little scared about going to Britain but everybody has been so kind so far.”

The Thaksin debate. Did he jump or was he pushed?

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on August 12, 2008

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Was Thaksin Shinawatra deliberately allowed to leave?

From Andrew Drummond

Request: Times Sport.

Monday 11^th August 2008

Thaksin Shinawatra’s decision to flee to Britain was not only predicted but almost invited and today only his staunchest supporters seemed genuinely surprised in Thailand.

Two weeks ago on July 29^th both he and his wife Pojaman had applied to the courts to travel not only to Beijing for the Olympics but also to Britain for the start of the football season.

They had been granted permission only to travel to Beijing after which the courts would consider their British trip.

No sooner had they left than the Bangkok press predicted that they would not return. This was immediately vehemently denied at the weekend by people representing Thaksin saying not only would Thaksin and his wife return to Thailand but also giving the flight number and arrival time from Beijing.

A crowd of cheery supporters waited in vain at the airport.

Pojaman had already been convicted of a massive tax fraud and although she had been granted bail and could delay any imposition of sentence for years while on appeal, there was no appeal for the cases the couple were about to face.

Thaksin and his wife were due today to return to the Supreme Court in Bangkok in Bangkok to face the first in a series of other corruption charges. They were accused of corruptly buying government land at a knock down price in the centre of Bangkok, while Thaksin was in power, something akin to Gordon Brown ordering the acquisition of 16 acres of Whitehall for personal development.

And in this case three of their lawyers have already been jailed for trying to bribe a judge.

Thaksin is also due to face other corruption charges. One is that he brokered a deal with the Burmese military junta enabling them to get very cheap credit from the Thai government Export Import Bank – provided they invested in business with his Shin Communications corporation.

He is also accused of improperly running a government lottery.

“He was given the chance to leave. His permanent departure would bring an end to a lot of trouble in Thailand. He has massive support but also a section of the population is very angry at what he has done. They even suspect than on his recent trip he smuggled more money out,” a former Thai diplomatic official told me yesterday, before rushing off to join an anti-Thaksin demo.

“This is a Thai solution. But it’s not a good one.“

Last weekend it was reported that Pojaman boarded a flight to Beijing with nine cases, if so its of course rather a lot for such an Olympic opening ceremony, now matter how smart one wants to look.

In affect even though Thaksin has massive amounts of money frozen in Thailand nobody really knows his real wealth. If there is one thing he is good at it is moving his assets in and out of countries and banks. He has been acquitted once of concealing his assets, which he claimed was a genuine mistake. Another such charge is in the pipeline.

At the moment he is playing the ‘democracy’ card and he is citing Britain and a wonderful example of such.

Sweet talk? Opponents say that particular card was only dealt him when he was ousted in a military coup in September 2006.

Previous to that he had publicly stated that western styled democracy was not the answer for a country like Thailand and when he was criticised at in the United Nations over misleading the world when he claimed that Thailand did not have bird flu he famously retorted: “The United Nations is not my father.”

Opponents also claim that he was not so concerned about justice when hundreds of innocent people, if not the 2,500 quoted by Human Rights organisation, were injudicially killed in the ‘War against Drugs’ which he initiated in 2003. Nobody went through the courts for those offences perhaps because its a racing certainty that the police were the major offenders.

At any rate Thaksin’s hasty, or long planned departure, believe what you will, was good for the Thai Stock market which rallied on hearing the news of his departure.

It may also put an end to daily demonstrations against him throughout Thailand by the other ’champions’ of democracy the ‘People’s Alliance for Democracy’

At the moment however Thaksin Shinawatra probably needs Manchester City as much as the club needs his money. It is a major conduit of his cult of his personality to the rural people of Thailand, from where his major support comes.

And without the fame and exposure City gives him he could just fade into the background completely as just another oriental politician. There are no shortage of politicians in Thailand in the past, who have allegedly robbed the country and then had to spend a considerable time in exile – until they are forgiven, of their crimes forgotten.

Thaksin is not expected to return to Thailand in the near future. As one of his biographers, British academic Chris Baker, noted in Bangkok. “ He has defamed the court. So he has gone for good.”

Judges here are not addressed as ‘My Lord’ but when lawyers address them they usually end the sentence with the equivalent of ‘I am merely dust under your feet’.

The fact is that the judiciary is much the same as when Thaksin was in power . And he made full use of the judiciary to suppress his enemies. Although the investigations against him were done by committees set up by the military rulers who ousted him it was the judges who accepted the cases against him as worthy for trial. Hoisted by his own petard? We’ll have to leave it to other refs.

But the British government is going to be hard pressed to support him even though it disapproved of the coup. When Brits are in the mire in Thailand, often claiming they have been framed by Thai police, the standard operating proceduce from the British government is a rather muted: ‘We will not interfere in the judicial process of another country’. Sauce for the goose?

British pensioner awaited his own murder armed with a tazer - Daily Mail -Daily Telegraph - Daily Express

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on August 12, 2008

British pensioner killed in Thailand predicted his own death - Daily Telegraph edit

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British man murdered by Thai bride and her lover after he predicted his own death - Daily Mail edit

Link to SUN

Link to SKY TV News

From Andrew Drummond
Suwannaphum, Thailand- September 11 08

Photographs: Andrew Chant
A retired British design engineer predicted his own murder and sat helplessly in his tropical ‘palace’ waiting for it to happen.

Friends said today they armed 69-yr-old Ian Beeston with a tazer gun to protect himself. But it was not enough.
Last Saturday they found body his body. The pensioner who worked at Perkins and Ford’s Dagenham had been beaten and stabbed to death. Police said it took him seven hours to die.
Today Beeston’s wife and her Thai lover were arrested and charged with the murder as horrified onlookers ,shocked at the callousness of the deed, jeered and shouted ‘hia’ (Monitor lizard) – a strong Thai insult.

(Crowds outside Beeston’s home await the murder reconstruction)

Neill James a consular official of the British Embassy in Bangkok who attended the murder scene in the north eastern Thai province of Roi-Et called on local police for a transparent enquiry, said local police.

(Ian Beeston and his wife present water heaters to local police)

Beeston had predicted his own death in writing. He wrote a letter saying ‘It is just a matter of time now. I am in real fear for my own life. I need things to proceed quickly”. He left the letter with lawyers.
Trouble started just four months ago when Beeston, married nine years to his 42-yr-old Thai wife, Wacheerawan, nicknamed ‘Wanna’ discovered that she had cashed in all the property he had bought in Thailand at a local bank.

He had invested all his life savings in over an acre of property and built his marital home, a guesthouse and a restaurant near a village called Suwannaphum, meaning ‘Golden Land’. Thai newspapers this week described him home (above) as ‘ palatial’.
But under Thai law, as foreigners cannot own property he had put it in his wife’s name.
“I thought she loved me but she just wanted my cash,” penniless divorcee Beeston , who arrived in Thailand with £350,000 told friends at the time. He then asked his wife to leave the marital home and live in a shack with corrugated iron roof nearby. (below)

And he began selling all moveable objects in the house and restaurant piece by piece to survive until he could legally get the funds to return home.
“It was like he has signed his own death warrant,” said neighbour Andrew Herrington, 51, a retired HGV driver from Sheldon, Birmingham.
“His wife (pictured below right) lived behind the main house with her Thai boyfriend. Every time we went to visit she would come out and scream and order us away. ‘This is my house. This is my land’, she would shout.

“I was due to meet Ian on Sunday. We had to meet on the main road near his village, because his wife would create a fuss if any westerners came. But he never turned up. I was very suspicious.
“Ian knew that he was going to be murdered. He had already complained that while he was away she had put something inside a beer in his fridge.
“He had felt ill. So he sent the beer away for analysis to a local hospital. He was awaiting the results.
“But it was an open secret in the area that Ian was going to be murdered.
“When she arrived in the village she took her husband bearing gifts to all the police and local dignitaries. But she had a secret police lover too.
“When I recently went home to Birmingham a policeman told me ‘ Perhaps your friend will not be alive when you come back’.
“So when I went to his house on Sunday and saw his car was there and the house locked up, I knew then his time had come. His wife came out shouting at me and my wife to go away. We decided to call the police.
“When they came they found his badly beaten body. I identified him. Only the week before he had been at my house to collect a box of Mars chocolate bars. He did not like the ones made in Asia.
“Ian was a nice and charming man, always helping others. He helped me with the wiring in my house and he designed my stairs, but he would not take a penny. But secretly he was broke and he had nowhere to go once his home had been taken away from him.”
Another neighbour Australian Bill Lamb, from Woolagong, nr Sydney said: “Ian was a lovely chap. But whenever we visited his wife would come out from behind the house and shout at us. She complained to the village chief to keep us away.
“Ian was helping me with some welding. He was a jack of all trade. He told us all he was going to be murdered, and quite frankly we believed him, and thought so too.
“Friends had brought him a stun gun, a tazer, to use to protect himself. We wanted him to go home to England but he was spending his last pennies trying to get his property back. He was due in court today.
“For the last three months he had been a prisoner in his own house. We have been bringing him food, but he has been living on mashed potatoes.
“The grass around his house has grown because his wife has chased the gardeners away. He was a very tidy man.”
Police Captain Patapong Patniboon of Suwannaphum Police said: “Ian Beeston’s wife and a Thai friend from Petchabun Province, Somchit Janong, 48, have both been arrested for her murder. We have assured the British Embassy that the investigation will be thorough.”

Yesterday Province, Somchit re-enacted the crime saying he did it for ‘Wanna’.
A British Embassy official said that attempts were being made to trace Beeston’s grown up children, whom had moved abroad, and his ex-wife.
*Three years ago Briton Toby Charnaud, a gentleman farmer aged 42, was beaten to death barbecued and his body fed to the tigers in Kaeng Krajan national park in Thailand after he divorced his Thai wife and removed her from his will. She was later charged and convicted with other relatives.

Wife of Premier League club boss jailed - jail boss fired - Daily Mail

Published

on August 1, 2008

Wife of Premier League club boss jailed for three years on tax evasion

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Daily Mail

By Andrew Drummond
Last updated at 2:02 PM on 31st July 2008

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The wife of Manchester City Football Club owner and former Thai Premier Thaksin Shinawatra was sentenced to three years jail for cheating her country out of millions in a massive tax fraud today.

But then she was released immediately on bail and is expecting to be leaving soon with her husband for the Beijing Olympics.

Pojaman Shinawatra is unexpected to do any real time in jail in the near future. Dressed in a pale blue suit and a string of pearls, she still looked shocked as the verdict was read.
The appeal process could take over eight years if the case goes to the Supreme Court. The defendants had ‘lied, cheated, and conspired to evade taxes, which is regarded as a serious crime,’ the judge said at the Criminal Court in Bangkok.

Convicted: Thailand’s deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra (L) and his wife Pojaman (R) arrive at the Court in Bangkok today

‘The defendants are high-profile and wealthy citizens,’ the judge added, remarking that Pojaman’s husband ‘was the leader of the country and she is obligated to pay taxes as a model for society.’

Pojaman, her brother and secretary were convicted of evading the equivalent of over £10million in taxes in 1997 through a complicated transfer of shares in the family’s flagship communications business Shin Corporation that involved placing stocks in the name of one of the family’s maids.

Pojaman, 51, was accused of conspiring together with her brother Bhanapot Damapong and her secretary.

Her brother, also received a two-year jail sentence. The secretary, who played a lesser supporting role, was sentenced to two years.
Thaksin’s spokesman, Pongthep Thepkanjana said: “Thaksin is not disheartened. They respect the court ruling but it is not the end. We will fight until the end.”
In fact it is only the beginning of s series of cases now hitting the courts which have been in the pipeline for two years.

Thailand’s Supreme Court decided this week to put Thaksin on trial for corruptly offering the Burmese military junta a low interest loan from the Thai government’s Export-Import Bank in a deal to benefit his family’s satellite and broadband business.

Both he and Pojaman are also currently on trial for corruptly acquiring land in the centre of Bangkok from a Thai government department at a third of its market price, something akin to Gordon Brown ordering his government to hand over 13 acres of Whitehall.

In another case Thaksin Shinawatra is also accused of initiating a government lottery, the proceeds of which were not properly accounted. As these cases are being heard in the Supreme Court there is no appeal.

With houses in Hong Kong and the U.K. and billons of dollars offshore many people in Thailand have expressed the view that they do not think Thaksin Shinawatra will come back from the Olympics.

But if he does, they say, he is already prepared.

They point to the fact that in an unusual move a recent Cabinet resolution essentially replaced The Director General of Thailand’s Prisons, with the former Director General, whom Thaksin appointed.

The outgoing Director-General Wanchai Roujanavong is an authority on international crime and apparently corrupt politicians.

His book ‘Organised Crime in Thailand’ details how politicians play a major part in organised crime in Thailand, how they avoid tax, buy votes, and to a certain extent control the courts, while at the same time playing the role of benefactor to the people.

He said: ‘I expected to be here for another year. But I am a civil servant I must go where I am sent.”‘

‘I decided to pluck all my resources to live- The Sun June 09 08

Published

on June 12, 2008

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British divers swept out to sea tell of their terrifying ordeal

From Andrew Drummond, Pulau Bidadari, Indonesia

For SUN story and slide show click here
UNEDITED VERSION HERE

From Andrew Drummond, Pulau Bidadari, Indonesia

This is the moment 25-yr-old Charlotte Allin thought she was about to die.

Charlotte hanging on to ‘Wilson’. Copyright James Manning

Strapped to a long with four other castaways and having been swept 40 miles by an ocean current her eyes can reveal her anguish. Right now she knows she may never see land again.

The log, on which their lives depend, has been named ‘Wilson’, after the football Tom Hanks dressed up as an imaginary companion in the Hollywood film ‘Castaway’

Public school educated Charlotte knows her only choice is to paddle furiously with her colleagues for land but they are making no headway. It looks like they will be washed away far into the Indian Ocean never to be seen again.

But after weather conditions miraculously changed the party struggled ashore led by the heroics of her former Royal Marine Commando boyfriend only to be attacked by a lethal Komodo Dragon.

Now for the first time Charlotte and her boyfriend Jim Manning, 30, told of their two day two night ordeal, which began on what was their last planned dive off Komodo Islands in Indonesia.

Here on Pulai Bidadari, off the coast of Indonesia near the town of Labuan Bajo, recovering from exhaustion, dehydration, and cuts and bruises, they told of their fateful last dive with colleague Swede Helena Naradainen, Frenchman Lauren Pinel, and dive leader Kathleen Mitchinson, 50, from Carlisle.

“We had just done one dive site called the Hanging Gardens and went for our last dive 65 minutes at a place called Manta Corner.

“The dive went fine with our supervisor Kath. We went down 17 metres at 15.03, according to Jim’s watch, and saw Frog Fish and Scorpion Fish, Moray eels and sharks and surfaced at 16.08.

“We saw our dive boat and signalled. But the boat had its back to us. So we blew n our whistles and put out a bright orange Surface Marker Boy SMB). Still they did not see us so we put up another surface marker boy.

Added Jim: “I had waited for over an hour before to be picked up by a dive boat so I was not worried. But the current was taking us away quite quickly. So we put out a second and third markers boys.

“We drifted past a rock then between two islands. Each time we tried to swim towards the island across the current we failed.”

Said Charlotte: “Jim and I got separated from the rest who had ended up in some sort of whirlpool. We eventually kicked ourselves back to the group blowing whistles.

“By 6pm it was getting very dark. We needed to get to land. We saw lights on an island and tried to paddle towards it. But each time he headed towards an island he current took us past and around it.

“I was talking to the group trying to keep them interested, trying to keep their spirits, but maybe my spirits up. We were getting very thirsty and it was getting cold.

“We drifted past yet another island. The next hour must have been the worst. We knew from our dive leader Kath that the Indonesians could not search at night because of the reefs.

“I thought this is it. We are going to drift off into the Indian Ocean never to be found. I thought we would die of hypothermia. We were not worried about the reef sharks.

“Then we saw something black in the water in front. My first thought that it was a shark, then, more optimistically, a dolphin. But when we swam towards it we saw it was a log. A massive great tree stump about 18 inches in diameter. It was big enough to support us all.

“We clipped ourselves onto to the log and Jim clipped himself to me and I clipped myself on to Helena the Swede.

“Then the weather turned bad. The wind got up and do did the waves with them. We were all attached to the log and we were swirling around in the stormy water.

“We were swallowing water. We tried to use our masks to protect our faces. In the skies we saw shooting stars. Each time we saw one e veryone in the group made a wish. Some wished for dry land. Some wished for safety. I just wished for my life.

“Beside me Helena had taken ill. Basically she was seasick, but in an extreme way.
I tried to talk to everybody. I did not want to die. I made a decision looking up at the stars that I would live or die. I decided I had to pluck up all my resources to live.

“I had to be positive. We all had to stick together. We were kicking continuously even though the wind wand currents were swirling us around all the time. We were kicking to stay warm. Although Helena did not seem to be responding.

“My fingers were red and bruised from digging my nails into the log. My other arm was tucked under Jim’s life jacket. We had long since got rid of our diving weight belts.

“We chatted to each other. I asked Lauren about his travels. I asked Kath about her other diving experiences. Jim joked that he hoped Kath was not going to charge us for a night dive as well. We were just talking and joking to keep our spirits up, but we all knew what was happening was deadly serious.

“We knew we had to find land. Then at about 10.45 at night on Thursday the sea flattened out. Then we started kicked like mental for our lives.”

Said Jim from Barnstaple: “We knew then we had to kick ourselves to some sort of island if we were going to get through this. Everybody was aching. We all had cramps.

“At some point I saw a white patch ahead in the darkness. I thought it might be a beach. I said to the group that I would leave ‘Wilson’ and swim to the white patch. If it was a beach I would return and tell them.

“But some people were not in agreement. Certainly Charlotte was not. It was eventually agreed that both Kath and I go.

“There was a chance that once we let go of ‘Wilson’ we would let go of our lives. But this white patch was the only recognisable solid thing we could see.

“Kath and I swam off together and found we could make good progress without the log. It was ashore. But Kath could not get ashore. She was being flung against the rocks.

“We decided to switch places. I tried to get ashore and succeeded. It was a beach of sorts but there were massive white pebbles in the way. I found a way through and came back to signal to the rest of the group.

“First came Lauren the Frenchman then Helena, then Charlotte and finally Kath.”

Charlotte, Lauren, Helena on the rocks after striking land. Copyright James Manning
“Yes. We were delirious with joy, “ added Charlotte, “but we could not stand up. We had to lie down and look up at the sky. We were cold and shivering with unbearable pain in our legs and stomachs and unable to sleep – but we were alive!”

“Kath had decided that the island we were on was called Pulau Pandar. If that was true, she said, in the next cove would be a sandy beach where fisherman and live aboard dive boats spent a lot of time.

“Kath and Jim would go in the morning to raise the alarm.”

In fact the group had landed on Rinca Island, an island dominated by lethal Komodo Dragons, whose bite is fatal to both man and beast.

But when Kath and Jim went to search the following day they did not know this.

Jim, a former Corporal of 59 Independent Commando Squadron, Royal Engineers, who has done tours of duty both in Afghanistan and in Iraq and had been offered a place on an SAS course, takes up the story.

“When we woke up we found a hill behind us 200 metres high and very steep. This was not a walk it was a climb. Initially it was ok to go on hands and knees, we had to go through and under brambles and thorns.

“But it got to the stage that it was so steep that it one of us fell we were going to be in a very bad situation. I told Kath I would go on my own. And she made her way back to the beach.

“I had to be careful where I was putting my hands. I did not know what was in the crevices. When I got to the top I did see another bay. And started to go down the other side. I was stopped in my tracks. Actually I landed back on my arse rather than stumble right into a beehive, then backtracked.

“I went along the coast along the top of a cliff and saw another bay. I was parched. I could not breathe. The sun had come up and was beating down full and I had not had a drop of want since 2.30 pm the previous day.

“I managed to get down to a beach and dived into a rock pool to cool off.

“By this time I knew it was useless to go back and tell the group that this was the wrong island. I had to go on. I could not go up. The sun was too hot.

“But the cliffs were high and the only way to get round the island was by both swimming and climbing.

“But the swell was getting up too. I still had diving boots, but apart from that I was just about naked. The waves would bounce me against the rocks. I was able to use my boots to fend myself off most of the time, but I took a bit of a beating as well from the sharp rocks and crustaceans.

“When the current caught me it the waves would roll me over, take me out, turn me upside down. I did not know where I was. Each time I recovered I would swim madly for the shore.

“At one point I had to climb again and made my way up the cliff forcing my hands and fists into every available crevice. But this was not like army training, where we used ropes and you could even let yourself fall onto the rope to take a breather.

“Eventually I found a cove with a sandy beach. I thought I saw some people there and started shouting and swearing at them when they did not reply. When I got up closer I realised the people were just rocks, but they looked like people sitting and holding their knees.

“I saw monkeys and a herd of deer but they were too far in the distance. Eventually I found a section of rocks facing the sea, which had three flat shelf-like surfaces on which I could lie, although they were at an angle and I had to use me feet to stop slipping off.

“I could rest there and watch out for boats. I went back to the beach and gathered some leaves. I covered myself in leaves for warmth. All I had was shorts, a Rash Vest.

“I kept staring out to see and saw a boat and again I started shouting, then swearing. But it was not a boat it was a rock.

“At midnight I moved down to the bottom shelf because I could not stay awake to stop myself slipping off the higher shelf.

“Then in the morning after stripping off washing myself in the sea and began my lookout duties again.

“I was struggling to stay awake. Then I saw this speedboat approaching. I jumped and waved and ran down and jumped into the sea. It was 12.30 pm.

“My colleagues were all there. Everybody was smiling, even the Indonesians.

“I did not know I had spent all this time in Komodo Dragon land.”

While Jim was out looking for help Charlotte remained with the rest of the group on the beach where they had landed.

“The first morning our spirits were good. We saw three boats. One looked like it had spotted us and started coming towards us, then it turned away. We were waving our safety sausages (SMBs). We thought it had turned away to summon help.

“I had mixed emotions about Jim. I knew he was capable of doing the climbs and that he was physically and mentally strong. But I knew he could fall and if that happened nobody could help him.

“Kath and I started to get a fire going after collecting dry grass and by using a magnifying glass which she had. But it got really hot and we had to hide in the shade of the rocks, which were like giant white pebbles.

“We also put together an SOS sign made out of these giant white pebbles, but I could only carry one at a time and we were all absolutely parched. We were so, so, so thirsty.

“Every time the thirst played on me I just imagined I had drunk a large glass of Sprite (lemonade) with ice through a straw.

“I felt like I had had a drink. We found a coconut and Kath broke it open. But inside it was rotten. We kept it anyway just in case.

“We kept ourselves occupied by playing hangman or noughts and crosses in the sand.
Lauren the Frenchman spent the morning and afternoon on a lookout rock, coming back at midday for two hours because Kath said the fishermen would not be out during those hours.

“At midday the heat was unbearable there was no shade at all.

“We saw ships in the distance but nobody saw us and by about 4.30 pm I was beginning to despair. We found an overhang in the rocks by the shore and saw water dripping down. Kath and I tried to drink it. When we did we realised it was just sea water from the splashing waves.

“Then suddenly we heard a scream. We saw Helena and right next to her was a Komodo Dragon. It was just inches away. These Komodos can kill buffalo and deer with just one bite.
“The Dragon made a lunch at her and I saw his tongue darting out. Then he grabbed the hood of her suit which was beside her. We rushed and Kath picked up a couple of sticks and beat it, but it did not go away.

“Then the Komodo grabbed Jim’s wet suit which he had left behind. Kath hit the Dragon again and he left go

“We rushed to the sea to fill out bottles with sea water, because we were told the Komodos did not like water. But it did not seem concerned when we threw water over it.

“The Komodo Dragon kept coming back. It was big but not an adult, We knew it must have a mummy and a daddy about somewhere. People and other animals die from the bites from the bacteria.

“I collected all the wetsuits because we needed them to keep warm during the night. We let the Komodo have any masks or flippers or BCDs (buoyancy control devices) he wanted.

“We were confused what were Komodos doing on this island. We huddled together for the night.

“Lauren seemed to have the most energy and we asked him why. He said he had been eating sea snails. That cheered us up. The next morning we knew it was safe to eat them. So having slept all night on some big boulders we went down for breakfast,

“At first we just broke off the shells, smashed them with a stone and swallowed them.
But Lauren was chewing. So we gave them a try. They were black and slimey but actually not bad and we got some juice from them.

“But our spirits were still down. I did not think we would be able to survive one more night. By this time I thought Jim was dead. I thought even if we were rescued I would not leave without him.

“Then about midday we saw a boat out to see turn around and head in our direction.
Could that boat have at last spotted us? We did not want to let our hopes up. But it came on and came on towards us. Oh my God. It IS coming!

“Kath and I dropped on our knees and burst into tears.

“When we got on the boat and had some water we insisted that Jim was still out there. The boat took us around the island and then a crewman shouted from the front. He’s here. My darling was jumping up on a rock and waving his hands. Our lives had been spared.

“We do not blame anyone for what happened. It could have happened to anyone.
We are just so glad all of us to be alive.”

Charlotte and Jim’s trip was organised by Ernest Lewandowski from Locherbie, Scotland and Kathleen Mitchinson, from Carlyle who run Reefseekers Dive Centre out of Labuan Bajo.

Said Ernest afterwards: “We are so happy that everyone is safe. I had already got by group back into the boat. We raised the alarm when we could not find Kath’s group.

“I went to see a local soothsayer in Labuan and she predicted exactly where the group would be found. I am very proud of the way Kath led her group.”

‘

Charlotte, Jim, and Kathleen: Picture: Andrew Chant

Alone on dragon island … How Britons swept away during dive survived their terrifying ordeal - Mail On Sunday June 8 08

Published

For full story and pictures click here

on June 12, 2008

in General News and The Times

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By Andrew Drummond

Three British divers swept away by powerful currents in the shark-infested Indian Ocean told last night how they fought off an attack by a man-eating Komodo dragon, the world’s largest lizard.

The group were threatened by the 10ft beast as they awaited rescue on a remote Indonesian island.

They escaped its razor-sharp teeth and poisonous saliva, which it spits at victims, by throwing stones until the predatory animal slunk away.

In a graphic account of their 45-hour ordeal, dive instructor Kathleen Mitchinson described how they survived on nothing more than raw shellfish.

She said the scraps of food - and the knowledge that her partner of 20 years was searching for her - were the only things that kept her alive.

Sitting up in her hospital bed, Ms Mitchinson hugged Ernest Lewandowski and told him tearfully: ‘I didn’t give up hope. I’m so happy to be home and that we are all safe and sound.’

Ms Mitchinson had been in charge of a group of tourists who had gone to Komodo Island, the giant lizards’ natural habitat, last Thursday before setting out in a small wooden boat for what was supposed to be an hour-long dive.

With her were a British couple, former Royal Marine James Manning, 30, and his girlfriend Charlotte Allin, 24, and a Frenchman and a Swede.

Meanwhile Mr Lewandowski was diving with another group of visitors at the same spot. When his party surfaced, they were picked up first by the dive boat team.

But by the time the boat returned for Ms Mitchinson’s group they had been carried away by a strong current.

After a huge search involving the Indonesian navy and dozens of local fishermen, a rescue boat spotted the missing divers’ inflated orange and red ‘safety sausages’ - brightly coloured flotation devices designed to attract the attention of rescuers.

They were laid out in the shape of a cross on the rocks of Rinca Island, about 20 miles from where they had gone missing.

The divers are believed to have been in the water for around ten hours before being
washed on to the rocks.

They were taken to hospital - dehydrated, exhausted and sunburnt, but with no serious injuries.

One Indonesian rescuer said: ‘We saw them at the beach. They said they had found a Komodo dragon on the island which was ready to eat them. They had to throw stones to keep it away.’

Mr Lewandowski, 53, who runs a diving school with Ms Mitchinson on the nearby island of Flores, said the stranded divers had spent a terrifying night being buffeted by huge waves.He added: ‘They are very tired and hungry. The hospital has done a great job. Kath’s just really glad to be home - and grateful to be alive with the whole team.’

Asked about the terror of shark attacks, he replied: ‘They talked about what happened above them, not the creatures below.

‘It has been quite an ordeal, but they are all safe. That’s the most important thing.

‘They had a miraculous escape, but the fact is, they are all experienced divers. This was an absolute freak accident. There was nobody at fault.

‘They did all the right things: They stayed afloat in the surf and kept together as a group.

‘They grabbed hold of flotsam and jetsam and kept hold of that in huge waves out in the Indian Ocean, which were crashing over their heads.

‘They were in dangerous open ocean, the next stop to Antarctica. Most of the time they were totally covered in water.

‘Kath was the team leader and coordinated things, but they all took turns in keeping each other going. They worked as a team, which is one of the things that is vitally important.

‘Eventually, when shallow water was available, they swam towards the shore. They were all supporting each other. Anybody who became a weak link was made to have strength. That’s how they survived.

‘They went with the current, which was the only thing they could do. They kept as close to land as possible and when they could make it to land, they did.’

Ms Mitchinson and Mr Lewandowski, who met while diving in the north of England, have lived in Indonesia for 15 years, the past seven on the island of Flores, where they run a dive centre and turtle nursery.

Both are originally from Carlisle. Mr Lewandowski, 53, spent most of his life in Scotland before moving to the Far East.

He said: ‘Kath knows the area very well and they managed to survive by eating shellfish off the rocks, like little abalone, and utilising what they had around them - the sort of food you eat in posh restaurants.

‘They were eating them raw, which gave them energy and moisture.’

When rescue came, the large dive boat which spotted the castaways was unable to enter the inlet and a smaller craft was dispatched to pick up them up.

Mr Lewandowski said: ‘When I received news over the radio, I was ecstatic. I just wanted to hear Kath’s voice again.’

When they did get their tearful reunion later yesterday back on dry land at Labuan Bajo, Miss Mitchinson’s throat was so dry from swallowing salt water that she could hardly speak.

Mr Lewandowski said: ‘She just said, “I’m home safe and sound. I knew you wouldn’t give up on me…”

‘She had no doubt I would be doing everything in my power to find her. And she knew, no matter what, I wouldn’t stop.’

Mr Manning, from Devon, trained as a Royal Marine engineer and has his paratrooper’s wings.

Speaking at the family home near Cullompton, his brother Ollie said: ‘It’s been an anxious wait and we feared the worst when we were initially contacted and told he was missing.

‘James is a tough lad. He can look after himself. He was in the Army for ten years and I knew that if he could get everybody out of the water and on to a reef or beach then he’d be able to use the survival techniques he’d been taught.’

His mother Sally-Ann said: ‘He is physically shattered but otherwise OK.’

Ms Allin’s sister Sarah-Jane, 26, said at her home in Bideford, Devon: ‘We had a call from the Foreign Office at 5am and then Charlotte herself got through at 7am. She sounded tired and shocked but said she was all right.’

In Komodo National Park, where the three Britons were diving and where most of the creatures live, there have been eight serious incidents since 1980.

In the most recent - the first fatal attack on a human in 33 years - an eight-year-old boy died after he was mauled by a 10ft long, 15st dragon in 2007.

He was tossed around like a rag doll and savaged by the lizard’s razor-sharp teeth as it tried to snap his neck just as it would other prey.

Even if the boy had survived the attack, he would have died of blood poisoning from the 50 virulently toxic species of bacteria contained in the dragon’s saliva.

Probably the best-known victim of the dragons’ dangerous unpredictability is Basic Instinct actress Sharon Stone’s ex-husband Phil Bronstein.

He was on a tour of Los Angeles Zoo in 2001 and was in the dragon’s cage when the creature clamped its serrated teeth down on his foot.

After prising its jaw open and escaping, he had to have surgery to reattach severed tendons and rebuild a crushed big toe and was given massive doses of antibiotics to combat the poisonous saliva.

Attacks on humans are rare and the creatures, which are notoriously bad-tempered, mainly feed on monkeys, pigs, wild deer and even water buffalo.

A skilled and savage hunter, it is the only lizard species that hunts and kills prey larger than itself, and larger than it can swallow whole.

It can sprint at 15mph and has a keen sense of smell. But instead of chasing its prey, it prefers to lie still and camouflaged before lunging and sinking its teeth into its victim.

Experts say that even if its prey escapes, it will die within hours from septicaemia.

But despite its awesome strength, the komodo dragon is on endangered species lists and is under threat from tourism, poaching and volcanic activity.

About 3,000 live on Komodo Island and other islands 300 miles east of Bali, and there are some in captivity - a clutch of four was born at London Zoo in 2006.

Police re-arrest ‘The Ghost’ April 2 2008

Published

on April 3, 2008

. 1 Comment

Police re-arrest ‘The Ghost’ - April 2 2008

From Andrew Drummond
Bangkok
Wednesday April 2 08

A convicted British child-rapist was back behind bars in Thailand today after police revoked bail after angry protests by a child protection agency.

Maurice Praill, 77, nicknamed ‘The Ghost’ from Harold Hill, Essex, was sent to Nongplalai prison, Pattaya, after Sudarat Sereewat a member of the country’s National Child Protection Committee complained ‘on behalf of the children of Thailand’.

Praill had earlier boasted that a local policeman played the keyboards at his wedding to a 15-yr-old child bride in a ceremony blessed by Buddhist monks.

He will appear in court on April 7th on a charge of child sexual abuse with an eight year old boy where he is expected to ask for bail again.

Praill was convicted in 2001 and sentenced to 14 years in jail for the rape of two under-aged girls in Pattaya. But he never did time. He got bail to appeal against his conviction and when he lost his appeal in 2004, he was given bail again to appeal to Thailand’s Supreme Court.

He was arrested again last year together with three other foreigners and charged again with child sex abuse. In this case it was alleged young girls were delivered to foreigners on the back of a motorcycle. One of the alleged victims in this case was the daughter of Praill’s latest maid.

Praill was bailed. But the prosecution subsequently offered no evidence against him although an American was subsequently jailed for 16 years.

Then last month Praill was arrested for sexually abusing an eight year old boy. Again he was bailed, this time for 400,000 Thai baht (£6,411).

After he was released Sudarat Sereewat, also Secretary General of FACE (Fight Against Child Exploitation) protested to Region 2 Provincial Police, which covers the resort of Pattaya.

“If we can’t put this man behind bars to protect our children, who can we (have detained)?” she said.

Local newspapers in Pattaya have reported that Praill was arrested on allegations of child abuse even before 2001 but was released after paying local ‘fines’ at Pattaya Police station.

Shortly after his arrival in Thailand he went through a marriage ceremony to a 15-yr-old girl, the daughter of a previous maid. The wedding was blessed by monks and a Pattaya policeman played keyboards at the party claimed Praill, whose stepson Jon Goodman played soccer for Ireland, Crystal Palace and Wimbledon.

Praill, said he was surprised himself that he got bail. Nicknamed the ‘Ghost’ by children who describe his appearance as scary, he said after his release: “It’s incredible. How can an alleged offender who has committed rape against two young girls on four separate occasions ever get bail for that? And how could he get bail again? It could not happen in the UK, but it happened in Thailand which is comforting for me.”

The British Government has spent hundreds of thousand of pounds on courses for Thai police, social workers, and court officials, on how to deal with child sex offenders.

Most courses have been preceded by receptions at the Ambassador’s mansion.

Bea the hippy princess raves at the full moon - Mail on Sunday March 30 08

Published

on March 30, 2008

. 0 Comments

Bea the hippy princess raves at the full moon

Link to Mail on Sunday

By ANDREW DRUMMOND

Princess Beatrice has been enjoying a backpacker-style break in Thailand - drinking the local whisky and dancing on the beach into the early hours. Princess Beatrice 01

The 19-year-old flew into Phuket two weeks ago and headed for the picturesque island of Phi Phi with a group of 15 girlfriends and two armed guards.

Her party hired a block of 12 rooms at the £48-a-night Phi Phi Villa Resort, close to beautiful TonsaiBeach.

Each day she swam with her chums in the local bay and partied on the sands.

Last Saturday night, Beatrice’s group headed to Koh Phagnan to enjoy one of the island’s notorious “Full Moon” raves.

A tourist was stabbed to death at that party, although it is not known if Beatrice was aware of this.

The parties attract thousands of young travellers each full moon and have been the subject of Foreign Office warnings following a series of rapes and deaths.

Left: Princess Beatrice - file picture
Back on Phi Phi, the Princess’s favourite spots included the British-owned Tiger Bar and a Thai-run beach bar called Hippies, where backpackers dance under candlelight on the beach.

Philip Osman, 26, of the Tiger Bar said: “Beatrice certainly knew how to party. She was up there dancing and encouraging others to join in. Princess Beatrice Phi Phi 01

Picture - Dancing at Hippies’ Bar (Andrew Chant)

“She was drinking by the bucketful. She bought a bucket which she filled with Thai whisky, Red Bull, ice and coke. But I did not see her drunk.”

Princess Beatrice’s trip comes at a time when the country’s tourist authorities have expressed concern over attacks on tourists and have even come up with a plan to issue female tourists with whistles.

Recently a 27-yr-old Swedish woman was stabbed to death in broad daylight on Khao Mai Beach on the holiday island of Phuket.

At Hippies bar on Koh Phi Phim frequented by Princess Beatrice, a DJ currently faces a charged of murdering a Belgian tourist as he walked home. The tourist is alleged to have insulted a Thai woman.

A spokesman for Beatrice said she would not comment on a private trip.

Princess Beatrice Phi Phi 02 1

Selling booze by the bucket on Koh Phi Phi (Andrew Chant)

Princess Beatrice Tiger Bar Phi Phi 1

Philip Osman, from Swansea, and Toby Collingwood, from Hull, co-owners ‘Tiger Bar’ Phi Phi Island

Thai police played the keyboards at my wedding to child bride - says child rapist

Published

on March 23, 2008