POLICE DEATH SQUADS 'EXECUTING TRAFFICKERS'

Thai police are suspected of being responsible for most of the 352 deaths
in the country's war against drugs during the past two weeks

BANGKOK - Police death squads are believed to be executing drug traffickers
in Thailand's aggressive war against drugs.

The Thai police have been known to take matters into their own hands in the
past and mete out their brand of justice when they deem it necessary, and
there is a fear that this practice is being revived, a police source told
The Straits Times.Advertisement

A staggering 352 suspected drug traffickers have been killed in the past
two weeks.

Gruesome clips and pictures of bullet-ridden bodies are carried almost
daily by the local media.

Most of the dead are drug dealers murdered by their accomplices who want to
stop them squealing to the authorities, said Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

'It is bandits killing bandits,' he said.

The Thai police have acknowledged killing only 13 of them, 'all in
self-defence'.

But doubts about how these traffickers were killed are increasing by the day.

Many Thais still remember a notorious case in the 90s in which six
handcuffed drug traffickers were shot in the head, allegedly on the orders
of a Thai police general.

The men were killed in the midst of a group of Thai journalists in
Suphanburi province.

There are fears that the police are taking this route again, but on a
larger and more systematic scale, said the police source.

Refering to the latest death figures, he said: 'I would say a maximum of 30
per cent of the killings in the last two weeks would have been traffickers
killing each other.

'The rest of the dead were either killed in shootouts or extrajudicial
executions by special teams of the police.'

Indeed, many murders do not fit the pattern of an internal gang war.

Officially, there has been no mention of death squads.

In fact, Mr Thaksin has even warned police against taking the law into
their own hands and has threatened to act against them.

'If someone thinks their relative was killed in suspicious circumstances,
they can complain to me.

'I will have officials investigate.

'But I am confident the police would not do that because all the people who
were killed in self defence had a dark background,' said Mr Thaksin, a
former police officer.

But Thai and international human rights organisations are doubtful.

'Who would dare to complain?' asks Miss Somsri Hananuntasuk of Forum Asia,
a Thai non-governmental organisation.