A virulent opponent to Thailand’s brutal anti-drugs crackdown which has left nearly 1 500 dead, Porntip Rojanasunan is waging a battle against the police force, seeking to snare any of those responsible for extra-judicial killings.
Colourful, punk-haired Porntip, vice director of the Central Institute of Forensic Medicine of Thailand and a popular author, accuses police outright of preventing her from doing her job since the drugs blitz began on February 1.
”The crime scene is often set up,” she told AFP. ”The position of the body is not normal and drugs (found on the corpse) have been put into pockets afterwards.”
Arms jangling with silver bracelets, Porntip (48) recounted the case of two young traffickers killed in central Pathum Thani province the day they left prison, in the lead-up to the campaign kicking off.
”They both had a bullet in the back of the head, and they should have collapsed on their face. There should not have been any blood, but there was. It had been arranged,” she said.
Her institute, created last October, had been performing just a few autopsies each month before February. Now it is dealing with seven cases per day, although it lacks the resources to do autopsies on all of them.
Before February, the police normally called Porntip to determine whether cases were suspicious. ”In February, they avoided calling me,” she said. ”Police are afraid of me.”
When a nine-year-old child died last month in the car of an alleged trafficker who was fleeing police under a hail of gunfire, she was not informed by them but went straight to the scene when she heard about it.
”The police didn’t let me do anything,” she charged. ”I could only look outside the car, because they told me I had to keep the car the way it was. But after, they parked it in front of the police station, where anyone could touch it. And I saw something I cannot tell now.”
Porntip said political pressure to achieve results in the campaign was partly to blame for the nearly 1 500 people killed in the campaign by early this week. Police have claimed responsibility for just 31 of them, blaming the remainder on internal warring among drug traffickers seeking to protect themselves — but many question whether this is the truth.
The outspoken doctor pointed to the central province of Nakhon Nayok, where extra-judicial killings were very low in the first month of the campaign.
”After a review of the results that showed it was one of the provinces with the lowest results, extra-judicial killings began,” she claimed.
Porntip labelled the pattern of murders ”chain-killing”, citing one case where a motorcycle taxi driver was killed, followed by another from his group, which was topped by the death of their boss.
The current campaign aims to eradicate drugs from the country by the end of April, but is not likely to be effective in the long run, Porntip believes. ”It can work just for a short time, and it cannot get higher drug dealers, who are protected by politicians and police,” she said, arguing that only minor players were being killed and that a
woman eight-months pregnant was killed.
”In another case, a victims wife told me that her husband knew he was going to be shot and he wanted her to bring me the body. But he wanted to say he was only a small fish.”
Porntip emerged in a blaze of publicity five years ago when she solved a prominent case implicating one of her medical students who was murdered by her boyfriend. Her theory, which proved correct, was the opposite of that put forward by police.
”I didnt want to be famous at first. After, I used that to create my institute,” she said.
Her popularity has grown following the publication of several of her books, which detail her experiences in solving high-profile and difficult cases. Last year, after five years of fighting, she succeeded in creating an institute of medicine independent of police.
Placed under the direction of the justice ministry, it is responsible for autopsies in four provinces surrounding Bangkok: Nonthaburi, Pathum Thani, Ayutthaya and Nakhon Nayok.
”In other places, doctors just have an outside look and don’t take out the bullet,” she said. The institute labours under tough conditions, employing just 15 people, including three medical examiners. Porntip wants it staffed by more than 150 people if it were to operate properly.
”We have no equipment, no money,” she said. Her current career was not her first choice. She once aspired to be an interior designer: ”But my father wanted me to be a doctor.”
So Porntip specialised in an area where her punk style could remain intact. ”I didnt want to deal with patients, so I chose forensic medicine to be able to dress in this style,” she said.
A practising Buddhist, she believes in spirit life after death. ”Im Buddhist and I try to understand why all these murder cases came to me. I believe in the spirit of the dead and I believe they come to me naturally, and that they can protect me.” – Sapa-AFP