ROGUE THAI POLICE APT TO SHOOT FIRST IN DRUG WAR

Rights Group Says Death Squads Are At Work, And A Soldier Blames 'Bad Eggs'

Twenty-three suspected drug traffickers have been killed since Prime
Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's most recent war on drugs got under way,
police in Thailand have reported.

There is little sympathy for drug peddlers in Thailand but many people are
concerned that once again, victory will only be declared over the dead
bodies of victims of extrajudicial killings.

Police said their bullets accounted for only four of the 23 dead. But their
claim merely served to highlight the authorities' shadowy ways of
perpetuating a crackdown; few observers believe that a gang war has
spontaneously broken out to coincide with the premier's three-month-old
campaign.

Somchai Homlaor, secretary-general of the Asia Forum human rights group,
said: ''The only sensible conclusion is the police are sending out death
squads.''

A military source said that since part of the drug trade is carried out by
corrupt police, these bad eggs have good reason to dispose of people who
might confess in the face of a new government policy of carrying out the
death penalty for traffickers.

The army officer said: ''The first few killings might have been simple
assassinations, but once the traffickers know that they will almost
certainly be killed, they start to fight back. So yes, in that sense, you
have battles between drug gangs.''

Previous campaigns of this type have also ended with a pile of corpses
tagged with ''resisted arrest'' labels by a force that apparently fears no
investigation.

Amnesty International tried five years ago to investigate extrajudicial
killing. Its report said: ''Police often appear to operate with impunity
and are widely regarded as accountable to no one, sometimes even including
the government itself.'' Amnesty said it believed that police had
instituted ''a de facto shoot-to-kill policy to deal with suspected
traffickers'' and in some cases had shot dead suspects who had already
surrendered.

The most notorious case happened in late 1996, when six handcuffed
''amphetamine traffickers'' were taken to a house and shot with the local
media within earshot. The bodies were quickly cremated and the house burned
down.

Opposition leader Chuan Leekpai said that the spilling of blood so freely
would taint Thailand's image as a friendly, law-abiding country. Mr Chuan
saidon the Democrat Party's Web site that in creating a ''climate of fear''
the premier appeared to condone such killing.

Traditional drug trafficking that saw heroin passing through Thailand on
its way to other countries took a new, and for Thailand more worrying turn
in the early 1990s, when Myanmar-based drug producers started producing
amphetamines in large quantities.

The Thai health ministry recently estimated that one in 20 Thais took
yaa-baa - ''crazy drug'' - as amphetamines are known locally, and that half
of these were addicted.

Many officials have competed with each other to combat the drug menace, so
that an attempt last year to turn Kalasin province in the northeast into
the country's first drug-free zone was achieved with what local officials
called ''justified extrajudicial killing''.

The Bangkok Post pointed out at the time that trigger-happy police
undermine the community's efforts to name suspects and persuade people to
shun the trade.

Over the weekend, 268 suspected traffickers were arrested and more than
three million amphetamine pills seized, police said.

Critics of the current campaign say that rewards offered to the police for
drug seizures and for every arrested ''major trafficker'' merely tempt them
to hunt for more bodies.