Thailand | Reflection after the killing in a daycare center

(Na Klang) The King of Thailand Maha Vajiralongkorn goes Friday evening to the province of Nong Bua Lamphu (North), where the families prepare the funeral rites of the disappeared, the day after the “incomprehensible” massacre which left 36 dead, especially children in a crèche.

King Rama X is expected in a hospital in Nong Bua Lamphu at the bedside of the wounded, in a very rare direct interaction with his subjects for the monarch whose figure is sacred in the country.

Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha laid white flowers in the afternoon in front of the entrance gate of the daycare center, where the relatives of the victims were sobbing.

“I send you my condolences,” he said, before handing out giant paperboard compensation checks for 110,000 baht (just over 4,000 Canadian dollars).

The bereaved parents had gathered earlier in front of the daycare, a simple, well-kept-looking house that does not suggest that one of the worst killings in the country took place there the day before.

A shocked mother clutches the blanket of her missing child and holds her half-filled milk bottle in her hand.

Some children were only two years old, like little Kamram whose 19-year-old mother Panita is inconsolable. “It’s incomprehensible,” she breathes, her 11-month-old daughter in her arms.

“I was very shocked and scared. I couldn’t sleep, I didn’t think it would be my two grandsons,” aged three, said their grandmother Buarai Tanontong, 51, clutching her daughter’s shoulder.

“I still can’t accept what happened. Assailant, what is your heart made of? “, wrote on Facebook Seksan Srirach, the husband of a teacher pregnant with their child and killed at the crèche.

Massacre

A former police officer armed with a 9mm pistol and a long knife on Thursday killed 36 people, including 24 children – 21 boys and 3 girls – in a murderous journey that began at a daycare center in Na Klang district around 12 h 30.

He then took to the road and tried to run over passers-by, until he went to his home, “not far” from the nursery, according to the police. He killed his wife and their little boy there, then killed himself before 3 p.m., about three hours after the start of the killing.

Friday afternoon, small white and purple coffins were transported by truck to a Buddhist temple where funeral rites will be observed before cremation.

After this “horrible” massacre, Prayut Chan-O-Cha ordered the opening of an investigation and asked the police chief “to speed up the investigations”.

The first elements provided paint the portrait of a 34-year-old assailant, plagued by drug addiction problems which caused him to lose his post in the police last June.

Methamphetamine

“Everyone knew the shooter. He was a nice guy but later we all knew he was taking meth,” said Kamjad Pra-intr, a resident who came to support the families.

Blood samples from the shooter did not reveal the presence of drugs in his body, said Damrongsak Kittiprapat, the national police chief, on Friday.

“He had an argument with his wife” before his stroke, he continued, adding that “nothing irregular” had been detected in his behavior when he appeared in court the same morning drama to respond to charges of drug possession.

The official also indicated that his knife had been “his main weapon” when he attacked the nursery.

This is not the first time that Thailand has been bereaved by a massacre of this magnitude. In February 2020, a shooting perpetrated by an army officer left 29 dead, notably in a shopping center in Nakhon Ratchasima (East).

The Na Klang drama is a reminder of the extent of drug-related problems in the kingdom where wholesale and sale prices have fallen to historic lows due to the abundance of supply, according to data released in 2021 by the UN.

The rural province of Nong Bua Lamphu sits near the “golden triangle” on the borders of Burma and Laos, considered for decades to be the focal point of narcotics production in the region.