In vino stupiditas

BANGKOK: Most drunks will stop imbibing when they have spent their last baht on the devil’s brew, but not 41-year-old Kiat Sommee. Kiat was out drinking with friends one day when he ran out of cash. A bank, he reasoned, is a place where a lot of money is kept. There was only one possible course of action, so Kiat armed himself with a plastic gun and a kitchen knife and stumbled into his local branch of the Thai Farmer’s Bank in the Chom Thong district, where he boldly demanded – and was given – 5,000 baht. With visions of Beer Chang dancing in his head, Kiat was leaving the bank when police moved in to arrest him – an alert bank clerk having pressed an alarm bell to notify them. Kiat did not resist arrest. An inspector at the Bang Khunthien Police Station theorized that Kiat may have staged the robbery “just out of inebriation”. Perhaps the suspect confused procedures for withdrawing money from a bank with those employed in his normal job as a debt collector for a local loan shark.