Picture special: by Andrew Drummond, Bangkok Pictures: Andy Chant/Gavin Hill/Vera Productions(pops rewrite) Royal Marines fresh from a tour of duty fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan have been involved in armed stand-off with the mafia thugs on the Thai holiday island of Phuket.The marine ‘section’,  on exercise in South East Asia on ‘Operation Taurus’, faced down a mafia gun-man […]

Doctors in Bangkok have ceased to provide special medication for a 58-yr-old Scots woman who suffered severe head injuries when she was mugged in a Bangkok street at on her 30th wedding anniversary at the weekend. But they have refused to switch off life support systems for Lydia Riach from Inverness as it is against […]

Big Trouble in Thailand – Bravo Channel UKThis is a blog only(Warning this article comes with a drop-intro)I have a love-hate relationship with television.  Once in a blue moon I do a document then almost immediately afterwards, after the initial elation (because I almost always think they are good)  I vow never to do another one again, […]

From Andrew Drummond, BangkokLink The SUN A Scottish financial consultant was today keeping a bedside vigil beside his wife in Bangkok after she was violently attacked in the street last Saturday night. Douglas ‘Dougie’ Riach, 57, said he hoped his wife Lydia, 52, could hold on until their two sons arrived from Scotland later this week […]

A Thai court today jailed for life a Thai wife, her lover, and a professional hit man for the avaricious murder of her Canadian husband. Dale Henry, 48, was murdered on the orders of his 27-yr-old wife Maneerat  nicknamed ‘Nee’, the court found. She had conspired with her boyfriend Amornsak Ketkaew, and hired a professional […]

I am of course normally quite self-effacing. But I just could not resist giving this a larger audience. While on holiday recently in the Scottish Highlands I stayed for a night in Fort Augustus where I went to school.(Whenever I go back I usually have a few beers with the ‘village boys’ with whom in […]

I’m have been on holiday in Wester Ross  in the Western Highlands of Scotland with my wife Pat and daughter Annie and then finishing off down in Berkshire. Here’s Annie before the summer temperature dropped to 9 degrees C! and also in a second picture by the stream at the Mayfly pub near Andover when […]

From Andrew Drummond, BangkokAugust 1 2009 Link to the ObserverThe Foreign and Commonwealth office has admitted it has lost track of the Briton who fathered Samanatha Orobator’s baby in a jail in Laos as prison welfare workers express fear for his life.47-yr-old John Watson was removed from Phonthong Prison for foreigners in the country’s capital Vientiane […]

Briton arrested for third time for child abuse as Britain’s CEOP faces criticismJuly 22 2009A British property developer, whose family owned large estates in Ireland, has been arrested for the third time in the Thai beach resort of Pattaya for child sex abuse.Robert Alexander Horsman, 45, from Ipswich, was first arrested in March 2006. Then […]

I very rarely lose it but I am absolutely disgusted at comments allowed on Thai Visa.com in the news cuttings section ‘Boy drowned under whirpool in Pattaya Park’ and this is after censorship by the board’s moderators. This is about a 14-year-old boy Nathan Clark a British boy who drowned a couple of days ago. […]