DEATH ANGEL GIVES THAI DRUG DEALERS 'SHORT CUT TO HELL'

WHEN the "Death Angel" came to visit Pleng Manosin's son, he came quickly.
The assassin stepped out of an unmarked pick-up truck, grabbed the man by
the hair as he dozed in a hammock and shot him twice in the mouth. He then
jumped back in the vehicle and roared off.

Mr Pleng and his neighbours are sure the police murdered his son on July
11, just as they are sure the police killed two other suspected drug
dealers in Sisawang, a village in the rural north-east, within the past two
months.

Their accusations would never have been taken seriously until a regional
police commander revealed this week the existence of Operation Short Cut to
Hell, a South American-style undercover death squad executing drug dealers.

Lt Gen Pichai Sunthorn Sunthornsajjabul declared that the police in his
region, acting at times with soldiers and civilians, had turned to
extra-judicial methods after other approaches had failed.

He said the secret campaign had already accounted for 350 narcotics dealers
and aimed to wipe out another 1,000 this year.

He told the Nation newspaper: "If 1,000 troublemakers go missing, I don't
think it will cause anyone any problem. If there's not enough evidence for
legal action, drastic measures will be taken.

"We have applied legal means, political science and even Buddhism, but the
problem is just getting worse. Now it's time to rely on the Death Angel."

The Angel is an animist spirit that takes the damned to hell, a tradition
which many local people believe in.

After angry calls from his superiors, Gen Pichai began backpedalling
unconvincingly. He said his remarks might have been misconstrued because of
a bad telephone line. Some dealers died because they resisted arrest or
were killed in gang wars, he claimed.

But it was too late. The trigger-happy reputation of the Thai police is
well established. They honed their shoot-to-kill techniques against a Cold
War Communist uprising and since then have never been afraid to fire first.

Critics say a thick file of eliminations is good for the career. Gen
Pichai's unguarded garrulousness came amid a flurry of reports that the
army was planning assassination squads in response to the new government's
"get tough" policy on drugs, which saw 19 traffickers sentenced en masse to
death on Wednesday. No one imagined they were already operating on such a
scale for up to two years.

Yesterday, in the hamlets and villages around the north-eastern provincial
capital, Khon Kaen, villagers recounted a series of murder stories.

The accounts were very similar. An unmarked car approached the victim's
house. One or two gunmen, masked and in plain clothes, got out and without
hesitation shot their target at point-blank range.

According to a local journalist with extensive police contacts, the hit
squads have fanciful names such as Wild Rose or Tiger Unit. "They attack in
the evening or daytime, depending on whether the station can afford to pay
them overtime," he said.

Like many targets, Maliwan Awera's husband was warned by police a few days
before his death to leave his home in Ban Talee village. "I took our nephew
to school and when I came back a few minutes later he was dead," she recalls.

Her youngest daughter witnessed the attack two years ago and left the
village in trauma. She has never returned.

Despite her denials, neighbours say her husband, Tongpoon, was a drug user
who paid for his habit by dealing casually in yaa baa or "crazy medicine",
a powerful, paranoia-inducing drug that has swept the nation in the past
few years.

It is a methamphetamine, synthesised in dozens of factories in neighbouring
Burma and, more recently, Laos. Farming families typically earn #500 a
year; even a small amount of dealing in methamphetamines can bring in half
that.

For years, lorry drivers and rural labourers used weaker amphetamines in an
attempt to extend their waking hours and earning potential.

But they, along with rich nightclubbers in Bangkok, school pupils and the
urban poor, have become hooked on the much more addictive new drug.

Thousands are involved in the trade, including, by the police force's own
admission, hundreds of its own men. But none of the policemen has been a
target of Operation Short Cut to Hell.