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the Brazillian guy was shot because of a mistake - not deliberately

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Originally posted by IanB-UK:

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the Brazillian guy was shot because of a mistake - not deliberately

What was the mistake that made them "shoot" him several times?

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At the time 4 terrorist bombs had just exploded on packed out tube trains and a bus in central London killing dozens of innocent people.

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I didn't hear about Thaksin walking the streets and murdering innocents just for the hell of it and it would be stupid to assume he did. On a sensible suggestion, if someone shows me the evidence of where he has ordered Police to go and kill anyone, whether they are armed and dangerous or not in the pretence that they are involved in drugs then I would obviously be better informed. If he ordered the Police to clean up the spread of illegal drugs by force if necessary or deemed necessary then surely no different to here.

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Officials from both the Office of the Narcotics Control Board – the government’s main anti-drugs body – and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) now claim that more than 1,000 drug-war victims are innocent of all charges.

Thaksin has blamed the deaths on inter-gang warfare. “It’s a matter of bad guys killing bad guys,” he once said. In fact, all fingers point to his long-time employer: the Royal Thai Police.

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Then there was the “war on drugs”, another potential vote-winner. For years, ya ba, or “crazy medicine”, a cheap and highly addictive methamphetamine, had ripped through Thailand. By 2003, ya ba had 2m occasional and 500,000 regular users, according to Thai health and anti-drugs officials. In a notorious speech, Thaksin inflated these figures: “Almost 3m Thai children take drugs, and around 700,000 are seriously addicted… The drug sellers have been ruthless with the Thai people… so if we are ruthless with them, it is not a big deal.”

His audience was then left in no doubt what “ruthless” meant. Thaksin praised the efforts of Kalasin, a province that had declared itself drug-free after a campaign in which the corpses of suspected dealers were publicly displayed to warn others. “Sometimes people were shot dead and had their assets seized as well,” he went on.

“I think we have to be equally ruthless.” Then he urged police to “use hammer and fist; that is, act decisively and without mercy… If some drug traders die, it will be a common thing”.

Human Rights Watch condemned what it called this “endorsement of extreme violence”. Thaksin’s men echoed it. Drug dealers “will be put behind bars or even vanish without a trace”, vowed his interior minister, Wan Muhamad Noor Matha. “Who cares? They are destroying our country.”

Police and local authorities drew up so-called “blacklists” of drug suspects, which were submitted to the Interior Ministry. The Sunday Times Magazine has obtained an official letter sent by the ministry to provincial governors, explaining the three ways to remove names from the lists: “arrest, extrajudicial killing or loss of life (death for various reasons)”. It continues: “Drug dealers are traitors to the nation. We have to get rid of them. Don’t give them mercy.” Vasant Panich, a member of the NHRC, believes this is evidence of an official shoot-to-kill policy. “It can’t be interpreted any other way,” he says. Police and government officials were threatened with the sack for failing to meet targets, and offered cash incentives for arrests and drug seizures.

The campaign officially began on February 1, 2003. Barely three weeks later, the Interior Ministry announced that 993 people were dead, all but 16 of them victims of “gangland killings”. Deaths were gruesomely tallied on state-run television. “The reports were boastful,” recalls Chris Baker. “It was the first item on the news every day. And you were told that everyone was a drug dealer shot by another drug dealer.”

Few were convinced. The Thai police are widely loathed for their corruption and brutality. Torture in custody is commonplace: a Bangkok lawyer, who in 2004 publicly accused police of strangling, beating and electrocuting his clients, was abducted and almost certainly murdered by police. In Thailand, the dividing line between police and professional gunmen is “so thin as to be nonexistent”, observes Baker. Some officers moonlight as hitmen; others run gangs of them.

The NHRC member Vasant shows me another document. It is a chilling letter sent by local governments to drug suspects. “The anti-drugs centre of Ban Paew district has found that you have been misguided and involved in ya ba,” it reads. “To ensure you will live a good happy life, you should comply with the following instructions.” The suspect is then ordered to report to the nearest health centre and district office for a medical test and special identification card. The letter ends with what amounts to an official death threat: “The anti-drugs centre of Ban Paew district will not guarantee the safety of those who fail to follow the above instructions.”

As suspicions of police involvement grew, so did serious doubts over the accuracy of the “blacklists”. They included many cases of “people trying to smear one another”, admitted Thai police chief Sant Sarutanond. “Some people might have been mistakenly blacklisted, perhaps due to the carelessness of officials,” confessed a senior anti-drugs police officer. Even Thaksin’s loyal interior minister, Wan Noor, had serious doubts. “Some people whose names are there have never been involved in drugs,” he conceded. A blacklist in one province near Bangkok included a lawyer who had been helping people charged with drug-related offences.

None of this seemed to faze Thaksin. “It [murder] is not an unusual fate for wicked people,” he remarked. “The public should not be alarmed by their deaths.” When an NHRC member reported the killings to the United Nations, Thaksin called his behaviour “ugly”. The same member received telephone calls warning him to “stop speaking to the United Nations or die”. Amid growing international condemnation, Thaksin urged his compatriots to “do away with the thinking of the foreigners” on human rights.

But some deaths – including that of a nine-year-old boy killed when police opened fire on a drug suspect’s car, a 16-month-old baby shot dead in her mother’s arms, and a pregnant woman killed in front of her two young sons – proved harder to spin. Before long, the Interior Ministry stopped releasing statistics on drug-related deaths, and even instructed officials to use the term “expired” rather than killed when referring to suspects. The government also set up a committee to investigate the deaths, although the police did not send the reports it requested until late April, when the campaign was almost over. By then, the Iraq war had begun, and the world’s attention had shifted to a greater carnage.

A total of 2,656 people were killed during Thaksin’s “war on drugs”, according to his own government. More than 52,000 arrests were made and 3.7 billion baht (about £50m) in assets seized. “We are now in a position to declare that drugs… can no longer hurt us,” Thaksin announced later that year. “Many Thai people now have their sons and daughters back.”

But many Thai people had lost sons and daughters for ever. Today, Sa and Kaew Phumala struggle to support two grandsons, aged 5 and 12, whose parents were murdered in March 2003. The parents had appeared on a police blacklist after leasing two trucks and renovating their house in Khon Buri, an impoverished rural district about five hours’ drive from Bangkok.

“People wondered where the money had come from,” recalls Kaew, 65. “They assumed it was drug money.” In fact, the couple had won 6m baht (more than £80,000) in the government lottery but, fearing robbers, had kept the news secret. One morning, their car was stopped by three armed men in balaclavas. One of the men shot them in the head.

The NHRC has investigated the murder of Nikom and Kanraya Ounkaew. Last November it called upon the police to clear the couple’s names and find their killers. The police did neither. This does not surprise Kanraya’s father, Sa Phumala, 70. “The police will never catch the killers,” he says, “because the killers are the police.”

The widely held assumption that the police were behind the killings did not come from nowhere. Many victims were shot after reporting to their local police station or district office to clear their names or surrender. In February 2003, villagers in Phetchabun province saw police at a spot where, hours later, the mutilated corpses of four farmers were found. “Please understand,” a local cop told one of the dead men’s children, “we did not kill your father. It was police officers from Lom Sak” – another district.

Only a fraction of the killings were ever investigated. “After a murder, police usually come round and ask questions,” says Sa Phumala, the father of the slain lottery-winning couple. “But they never came.” The most compelling evidence against the police comes from within their own ranks. Somchai (not his real name) is a detective – a lieutenant colonel – in northeastern Thailand. We talk at night in the kitchen of his comfortable home. One of his relatives was killed during the drug war, and he is convinced the culprit is a policeman.

“I think he’s one of my own men,” he says.

Somchai blames only a handful of murders on “bad guys killing bad guys”. The majority were carried out by what he calls “teams” from provincial or regional police commands. These death squads identified their targets with help from local police, who provided mug shots – blacklisted people were routinely photographed – and then made themselves scarce. Sometimes, says Somchai, beat cops were recalled to the station while the killers got to work. But they all knew what was happening. “Every day at the station we’d discuss the latest killings,” he recalls.

A few principled government officials resigned. Somchai wasn’t one of them. “There were only two ways to remove someone’s name from a blacklist,” he explains. “Arrest them or kill them.” It was the cruellest paradox: the less evidence against you, the more likely you were to be killed. “If you couldn’t arrest them, then how else could you remove them from the list?” he asks. “We tried to gather evidence. The ones we had no evidence against were killed.”

Once marked for death, not even evidence of innocence could change a victim’s fate. Police ordered Nikom Ounkaew to prove his lottery win with a letter from the government lottery office; this he did, but he and his wife were still murdered. The schoolboy Chaowat Suwantha, 19, had obeyed five or six summonses to the police station and district office, submitted to urine tests, and agreed to attend a five-day drug awareness course. He was gunned down on his way home from his last day at school. A police mug shot was found on his dead body.

What compelled these officers to kill? “They believed what the media told them – that the victims were all bad people who deserved to die,” replies Somchai. The campaign quickly gathered a homicidal momentum that only one man had any power over. “Thaksin could have stopped it.”

For years, the police force was part of the Interior Ministry, but under Thaksin it was directly supervised by the prime minister’s office. “I will take full responsibility to ensure these three months have real value, that they make history in dealing with drugs in Thailand,” said Thaksin at the time. Could he have been unaware of, or powerless to halt, the police-orchestrated killing spree he set in motion?

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Originally posted by ash:
They shot him 4 times because they wanted to be 100% sure he died quickly because they thought he might detonate another bomb. It was a mistake and very unfortunate for him and his family but certainly not a calculated act of murder a la Thaksin.
ash

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Will the military have last word?

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A pregnant woman killed in front of her two young sons? Schoolboys shot in the head? Come on Ian, admit it you are very wrong on this one!

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Not even worth a reply - stupid, just plain stupid.

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Was the opening question, the answer to which is quite simple.

That answer is Yes.

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as I have not been following the current elections.Is thaksins old party standing at this election or a party that is at least connected to ?.

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What is the lightly outcome for the army?

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Is there a party that the army supports?

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Also if so ,is the chosen party by the army the party most likely to win ?

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Is there a possibility of a political backlash, and public unrest with the results of this election.

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Also is there an independent body monitoring, to make sure votes are counted correctly and honestly ?

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If the party the army, does not support wins.How likely is it in later days or months that there will be an other Coup with the army claiming corruption yet again.

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At least he doesn't hoard his money or spend others claiming it is his, how much has Northern Rock got from the tax payer now and when will the returns start to show? Corruption, Thaksin is an Angel compared to our Politicians!