Cursed by spirits

BANGKOK: A man from Buri Ram province who went on a three-day drinking binge returned to his job in the capital with a terrible pain in his abdomen – which he apparently tried to cure by operating on himself. The man, identified as a 32-year-old Sanan Jodrum, having three days vacation, did what most low-paid laborers in Bangkok do: he boarded a bus and went back to his hometown to see family and friends. After saying a brief hello to his wife, he joined a wong lao (literally, a “whisky circle”) with his rural friends, drinking continuously for three days and three nights – without eating. When he returned to the capital, he suffered from terrible stomach pains. He consulted a doctor who told him it was the result of excessive alcohol intake and lack of food. The doctor gave him a couple of injections but these did not help. Now that conventional medicine had failed him, K. Sanan became convinced that the cause of his gastrointestinal woes was sorcery. According to a local superstition, it is possible to curse a person in such a way that an indigestible strip of buffalo hide somehow finds its way into an enemy’s stomach, causing great pain followed by agonizing death. On the morning of January 7, K. Sanan was found dead. Arriving on the scene, investigators found his lifeless body lying face-up in a pool of blood, a single knife wound, apparently self-inflicted, running from the top of his ribcage to just below his navel. His intestines had burst though the wound. No buffalo hide was recovered.