Thai hill-tribe men ‘set up’ for rape, murder of Aussies

A report in The Australian says that Thai police set up two hill-tribe men to take the rap for the murder of Australian student Kelvin Bourke and the rape of his girlfriend Sheri McFarlane in northern Thailand in 2000.

Thailand’s Supreme Court delivered a final appeal verdict in Chiang Mai on Monday, acquitting two men previously given the death sentence for the crimes, the court saying that the police case against Sangthong sae Yang and Inthorn sae Jong, two Chinese Haw men now in their mid-20s, was flawed.

Judges said new evidence showed DNA extracted from both defendants’ sperm did not match that found in the rape victim, McFarlane.

The DNA evidence was suppressed at their trial in Fang, which found the two guilty of murder and rape in July 2002 and sentenced them to death. Monday’s ruling upheld a Court of Appeal decision in 2004 that overturned the original verdict.

Just as in the case of British backpacker Kirsty Jones, 23, who was murdered and raped in a guest house in Chiang Mai, police in the same year tried to clear up the case by picking on non-Thai nationals.

In both cases they used torture and ignored DNA evidence of sperm that proved the hill-tribe scapegoats innocent.

In the case of Jones, from Wales, a Karen guide was tortured and police even tried to extract sperm from him, possibly to place in the crime scene.

Their plot was exposed after the Guides Association of Chiang Mai marched on the police station.

But the Chinese Haw suspects arrested by police for the attack on Bourke and McFarlane, from Melbourne, had no such organisation to support them and spent two years on death row.

Bourke and McFarlane were camping near the northern Thai town of Fang, in Chiang Mai province, when they were attacked by four men on February 3, 2003.

Bourke was beaten and then shot trying to defend his girlfriend.  McFarlane was raped and brutally beaten but escaped after pretending to be dead.

Based on alleged confessions, Yang and Jong were convicted and sentenced to death despite the fact that the DNA sperm was not theirs and there was photographic evidence that they were many hours away from the murder scene at the time of the incident.

The police case against the hill-tribe men, both in their mid-20s and descendants of the Chinese Kuomintang army who fled the Cultural Revolution, was based on a controversial identification of one of the pair by McFarlane just days after the attack.

The case was the subject of a documentary expose on Thai television in which police were accused of threatening to kill the families of the two young men if they did not confess to the crime – and stage a public re-enactment for the media.

Despite what the defence say is overwhelming evidence of their innocence, the prosecution has appealed against their release, a common tactic in Thailand used to wear down defendants and lawyers.

The men’s lawyer, Wirachai Wangkahaemsuk, said: “The case against them is so weak that they should drop this appeal and pay compensation.”

He described his clients as scapegoats for a crime that local police were under enormous pressure to resolve quickly, because of damage to the tourism industry and a planned visit to the region by Thailand’s Queen Sirikit.

Bourke was the third Australian murdered there in 11 months.

At the time, the investigation into the murder and rape was criticised as being incompetent.

In the case of the murder of Jones, a British Embassy official was quoted in the Nation newspaper in Bangkok as describing the investigation as shambolic.

The investigations into the murder and rape of Jones, the murder of Bourke, and the rape of McFarlane appear as if they will never be satisfactorily completed.

Report by The Mole