Chick or cheat?

PATONG: A front-page headline in the December 30 edition of a daily Thai-language newspaper shocked readers with the horrific news that a mother had murdered her newborn child and left its lifeless corpse to rot in a field behind a row of low-rent apartments. The headline for the initial report, roughly translated, read: “Wicked brutality: Mother kills child, stuffs in box.” The report featured a fuzzy picture of the “newborn”, accompanied by the caption: State of the corpse of the newborn, killed by mother with the heart of an ogre. The corpse was found in a foam box, which was thrown behind a row flats belonging to bar girls and alien laborer during the middle of the night in Tambon Patong, Kathu District, Phuket Province. The report said that the box was discovered at about 5:30 pm on December 28 by workers at the Damrongphan Wood shop, off Sainamyen Rd. So bad was the state of the smell emanating from the box that police and workers with the Kusoldharm Volunteer Rescue Foundation were called in to investigate. They took the box of rotting flesh to Patong Hospital, where it was photographed. The report read that the body of the “newborn” was so badly decomposed that doctors there found it impossible to determine its gender. The report also quoted an unnamed source in the Kathu Police as saying that the newborn was probably born to either a bar girl or a poor alien worker who lacked the mental capacity to care for it, and therefore killed it, stuffed its remains into the box and threw it away. When the Gazette called Kathu Police duty officer Pol Maj Pisit Chuenpet to confirm the gruesome details a different story emerged. The rotting flesh was discovered by workers as described, but it was unlikely the remains of a human baby, he said. “I think that it looked more like a bag of rotten chicken than a dead baby. We only found a few bones, and they resembled those of a chicken leg. We didn’t find a skull or anything else indicating it was human,” he said. “It would make no sense for someone to wrap a body up like that and leave it in a place where people could see it. It would be better for them to bury it and conceal the crime,” he added. “I do not want people to panic or say things that are not true. I remember a case, around the time when they first started building Jungceylon, when workers found something buried near the site. People thought it might be a dead body, so by the time we got there there were lots of people standing around, expecting to see a human corpse. But it turned out to be the bodies of four dogs that somebody had poisoned and buried there,” he said. Just to be on the safe side, the remains would be sent from the hospital to a police forensics laboratory for further examination, Maj Pisit said.