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Murder of British backpackers on Koh Tao solved, say Thai police | |
(about 5 hours later) | |
Police in Thailand say they have solved the murder of two British backpackers found dead on a holiday island after a pair of Burmese migrant workers confessed to killing Hannah Witheridge and David Miller. | |
The Burmese workers were taken to the area where the Britons’ bodies were found as part of a “reconstruction” orchestrated by Thai police. | |
However, as Thai authorities said they hoped the double killing last month would no longer hamper Thailand’s vital tourism industry, human rights observers said they were suspicious of confessions given apparently without the suspects having access to lawyers. | |
Police dismissed the worries, saying DNA evidence corroborated the confessions, and that the young Burmese men had chosen to not have legal assistance. | |
The bodies of Witheridge, 23, from Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, and Miller, 24, from Jersey, were found together on a beach on Koh Tao, a popular destination with young foreign tourists, on 15 September. Postmortem examinations showed Witheridge died of head injuries, while Miller had also suffered severe blows to the head and had drowned in the surf. | |
An initially chaotic police investigation saw media and onlookers trample over the murder scene and the focus fall variously on Burmese workers and British brothers who had travelled with Miller, before Thailand’s national head of police, Somyot Poompanmoung, intervened. | |
On Friday, Somyot said that the two suspects, identified only as Win, 21, and Saw, 23, had both admitted raping Witheridge and killing the Britons. DNA samples from the men matched that found on the bodies, he added. | |
The police chief said sexual jealousy was the motive: “The suspects saw them kissing and were aroused, so they attacked and got rid of the man and proceeded to rape the female victim.” | |
He added: “The suspects admitted that they are the real culprits so we have brought both to do a reconstruction.” | |
Such reconstructions, commonly used by Thai police, involved the Burmese men being led to the rocky alcove where the bodies were found. They wore flak jackets and motorcycle helmets to protect them from a crowd of onlookers. | |
A third Burmese man also detained is believed to be a witness and is under police protection, the AFP news agency said. | |
After evidence-gathering was complete police would seek a formal warrant, said Somyot’s deputy, Jaktip Chaijinda: “Today the case should be finished because we want to clear this case up as soon as possible so that our tourism industry can bounce back.” | |
Some rights groups have expressed worries at the police eagerness to declare the case solved. Burmese migrants, of whom there are about 2.5m in Thailand, mainly working in menial jobs, have previously been wrongly blamed for crimes. | |
“The suspects have been kept without legal representation. We still don’t have lawyers observing the process directly,” Pornpen Khongkachonkiet, a human rights activist, told Reuters. “So we are suspicious about the judicial process in terms of these alleged confessions.” | |
Somyot said the men had not requested lawyers: “If they had asked for lawyers we would have provided lawyers for them as this is their basic right.” | |
Thailand’s tourism industry has suffered in the wake of a coup in May, with the country still under martial law. |
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