Three murder victims wash up

PHUKET: Police recovered the bodies of three men last week, the victims of apparently unrelated murders and all assumed to have been Burmese laborers.

The first body was discovered at about 7 am on July 29 at the port area in Rassada. The victim, dressed in a blue shirt and blue Chinese-style trousers, had a large stab wound to the head. Police estimated he died at least two days earlier.

No additional evidence was recovered to help establish the identity of the victim, whose remains were being held in the Vachira Phuket Hospital morgue more than a week later.

Phuket City Police Inspector Lt Col Sarit Buthnongsang yesterday told the Gazette that police were still trying to establish the man’s identity so that relatives could be contacted to collect the body.

“We have people coming to view the body every day, but thus far none have identified themselves as relatives. We assume him to be a Burmese crew member of a fishing boat whose body was tossed into the sea,” Col Sarit said.

The second body was discovered about 9:30 am on July 31, according to a report in local Thai-language newspaper Siang Tai.

The victim was found with seven stab wounds to his back lying face-down in a mangrove forest near the “monkey viewpoint”on the road to Koh Sireh.

A man collecting crabs in the area found the body. He told police he had seen the man about 1:15 am the night before being attacked by a group of about seven people who were drinking in the area, but that he was too afraid to answer his calls for help, the report said.

The same newspaper also reported a third body washed up in the late afternoon of August 1 on the beach at Cape Panwa, a few kilometers south of the Deep Sea Port in Tambon Wichit Village 8.

The report quoted police as saying the body was that of a man aged 25 to 30 with an eight-inch knife still stuck in his neck.

The victim also had a deep knife wound in his left side of his abdomen through which his intestines had protruded. Wearing only a brown T-shirt, the victim had a tattoo of a female manohra dancer on his right arm. His remains were sent to Vachira Phuket Hospital. Police estimated the time of death as two days before the discovery of the body, the report read.

The Gazette has not yet been able to independently confirm the Siang Tai reports.