The chief justice of the Criminal Court has explained the reason why lese majeste inmate Ampon Tangnoppakul, who died on Tuesday, was denied bail.

Thawee Prachuablarp said yesterday that after the Criminal Court delivered its verdict against Ampon, his lawyer appealed for bail release on the grounds of his ill health.

While the Appeal Court was considering his bail appeal, his lawyer also lodged an appeal for bail release directly with the Supreme Court. However, the Supreme Court rejected the appeal on March 15, Mr Thawee said.

Mr Thawee said Ampon’s lawyer decided to halt the appeal process in the Appeal Court on April 3 and instead ask for a royal pardon for his client. The process of seeking a royal pardon can begin only after a case is finalised.

Mr Thawee explained that since the lawyer stopped the appeal process, Ampon’s right to bail had been forfeited.

Meanwhile, Kobkiat Kasiwiwat, deputy director-general of the Corrections Department, insisted all prisoners who were ill receive standard medical treatment at all prisons nationwide.

He was responding to an allegation by red shirt supporters that Ampon, who died of liver cancer, may not have been given adequate medical care in prison.

At prisons in Bangkok and other provinces, doctors and nurses are brought in to look after sick prisoners, Mr Kobkiat said.

As for large prisons such as the Bangkok Remand Prison, sick inmates are admitted to the Corrections Department Hospital staffed by specialists in various medical fields, Mr Kobkiat said.

He said Ampon had been well looked after and had been allowed to go out to receive chemotherapy at Rachvipa MRI Centre five times last year and twice this year.

On Nov 23 last year, Ampon was found guilty on four counts of violating the lese majeste law and the Computer Crime Act for sending four SMS messages deemed by the court as defamatory to the King and the Queen.

The messages were sent to Somkiat Krongwattanasuk, secretary to then prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, in May 2010. Ampon was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He was denied bail eight times.

A man has turned himself in to police to face assault charges after claiming his twin brother was mistakenly found guilty and sentenced to four years in prison for the crime he committed.

Anek Ounwong, 30, arrived at Pratunam Chulalongkorn police station yesterday in Thanyaburi district along with his mother Boonkerd Ounwong.

Mr Anek said he had been involved in an assault on Nov 19, 2010.

He had a fight with a group of teenagers, attacked them with a grass cutter and fled.

According to Mr Anek, he was unaware that his twin, Anont, had been prosecuted and sentenced to four years in jail in connection with the case, until he came home last week after being on the run.

“I want to take responsibility for what I did. My brother has a family to take care of,” he said. He appealed to police to review the case.

Ms Boonkerd said she tried in vain to tell police they had the wrong person.

Anont was booked for traffic law violations a few months after the assault, she said.

He had with him Mr Anek’s identification and police mistook him for the assault suspect.

Ms Boonkerd said she had sought help and received an amount of money from the Justice Ministry’s fund to get Anont out on bail.

He was released from prison last month during the appeal.

The Appeal Court recently upheld the jail term against Anont who has served about 14 months so far.

Pathum Thani police chief Samitthi Mukdasanit said yesterday the case was finalised and beyond police jurisdiction. He suggested both men petition the prosecution or the courts of justice.

“Police are ready to comply. But at this moment there is nothing we can do,” he said.

A Thai man in his 60s who became known as “Uncle SMS” after he was convicted of defaming Thailand’s royal family in mobile phone text messages has died while serving his 20-year prison term, his lawyer said Tuesday.

The case of Amphon Tangnoppakul, a grandfather who had suffered from mouth cancer, drew attention to Thailand’s severe lese majeste laws last November when he received one of the heaviest-ever sentences for someone accused of insulting the monarchy.

Amphon’s cause of death was not immediately known, but he had complained of stomach pains on Friday and was transferred to a correctional department prison, his lawyer Anon Numpa said.

It was not immediately clear when he died, but Amphon’s wife learned the news early Tuesday during a visit to the Bangkok prison where he was being held, Anon said.

Amphon was arrested in August 2010 and accused of sending four text messages to a government official that were deemed offensive to the queen. He denied sending them, however, and said he didn’t even know how to use the SMS function on his telephone to send texts.

He wept during his court proceedings, saying, “I love the King.”

The sentence was believed to be the heaviest ever received in a lese majeste case because of additional penalties issued under a related law, the 2007 Computer Crimes Act.

Before his arrest, Amphon had lived with his wife, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren in a rented room in Samut Prakan province, on the outskirts of Bangkok. He was retired and suffered from cancer of the mouth.

Central Correctional Hospital at Klong Prem Prison is a correctional referral center for sick inmates from various prisons in Bangkok and vicinity. Its newly constructed nine-storey building is designed to accommodate 500 inmate-patients and fully equipped with medical facilities such as 4 major operating rooms, 4 dental units, medical and dental filmless digital X-ray system, tele-medicine (psychiatry and radiology), etc.

A sophisticated eletronic monitoring system comprising 130 surveillan cameras enables both prison and hospital staffs to monitor every single immate-patient around the clock from any location in this building via gigabit Ethernet LAN and from anywhere in the world via high speed Internet. This correctional institution also provides DOTS program for tuberculosis, ARV program for HIV infected and “Prison Hospice” for terminally ill inmate patients.

Source: Department of Corrections

The 61-year-old Thai man better known as “Ah-gong” or “Uncle SMS” for sending text messages deemed insulting to the monarchy and who received a 20-year prison sentence died early today, Corrections Department Director-General Suchart Wonganantachai announced.

Lese majeste convict Ampol Tangnoppakul suffered stomachache since Thursday and had taken medication provided by Bangkok Remand Prison where he was serving his jail term, Mr Suchart said.

Mr Ampol’s condition continued to deteriorate, the corrections department chief said. The inmate was transferred to the prison hospital Friday and died early today.

Thailand’s Criminal Court handed down a 20-year jail term in November after Mr Ampol being found guilty under the lese majeste law and the 2007 Computer Crimes Act for texting messages deemed insulting Her Majesty the Queen in 2010.

The court refused to grant him bail.

Mr Ampol’s wife Rosmalin told reporters that a prison official called her this morning and told her that her husband had passed away without giving details.

“I never expected that my husband would die so suddenly as he was a man of patience. Never before had he shown his pain,” Mrs Rosmalin said. “Last Friday he complained to me that he was suffering from stomachache and flatulence.”

“Ah-gong used to express concern that he did not want other people to suffer injustice like him,” she stated.

The Corrections Department chief pledged that an autopsy of the departed inmate would be performed in a fair manner. He said Mr Ampol was suffering from cancer of the mouth but said he had shown no serious symptoms that could lead to his death.

It is reported that a group of activists will gather at Bangkok Remand Prison this evening to demonstrate their disapproval of the lese majeste law. (MCOT online news)

Chavoret Jaruboon, who died recently, took the lives of 55 men during his career as an executioner but had a gentle demeanour that belied his grisly job

What sort of person leans over a sub-machine gun bolted to the floor, takes aim at a target on a white curtain in front of a condemned man strapped to a cross, and then pumps 10 to 15 bullets into his back?

A family man, a rock musician, an altruist, a boozer and a civil servant in the Corrections Department for three decades.

In short: a man of wild contradictions and divided loyalties.

Chaovaret Jaruboon, who made his mark as Thailand’s last executioner, succumbed to cancer on Monday aged 64, leaving behind a wife in her 40s, three grown children and the bloodstained legacy of executing 55 inmates over almost two decades at Bang Kwang Central Prison on the edge of Bangkok.

His cremation will begin at 4pm today at the royal temple of Wat Bang Thai in Nonthaburi.

Even as a boy, crime and vice were in his peripheral vision. Chaovaret grew up in the Bangkok neighbourhood of Sri Yan, the family’s middle-class dwelling sandwiched between the mansions of magistrates and the hovels of harlots.

On his way to school every morning, he had to walk past a brothel that doubled as an opium den, where the dregs and fumes of last night’s debauch mingled.

His father was Buddhist, his mother Muslim, and the Saint Joan of Arc School he attended was Catholic. Much later in life, he would boast that he had never visited a bordello, never taken drugs and only committed one crime in his life: stealing a pack of greetings cards from another student back in Grade 4.

As staunch a moralist as he could be, defending capital punishment until his dying day, he also had a raucously rebellious streak that he vented by playing guitar in rock ‘n’roll bands that toured the GI bases in the ’60s. For him, taking a job as a prison guard served the dual purpose of supporting his family while working towards that final parole for all working stiffs: retirement with a pension.

Chaovaret always said that the worst job on the execution team was not pulling the trigger; it was having to walk into the death row cell to read out the final decision of the court to the condemned man before whisking him off to a final meal and blessing from a Buddhist monk.

En route to the ”room to end all suffering” (as the death chamber is referred to in Thai), Chaovaret said, ”I heard it all _ crying, begging and cursing me.

”But some of them just walked in without a word. They were ready to die.”

Chaovaret defused some dangerously combustible situations on death row. In his 2006 autobiography The Last Executioner, he remembered dealing with a serial rapist, convicted of raping and murdering a 10-year-old girl. When the condemned man was screaming at guards and still protesting his innocence, Chaovaret told him: ”Just think of it as bad karma coming back to you for what you have done. If you are positive when you go, you will end up in a better place, so empty your mind of anger and negativity.”

The contrite rapist wrote a letter to his father repeating the inescapable Buddhist cycle of life: birth, ageing, suffering and death.

One woman involved in a kidnapping-turned-murder fought the guards all the way into the death chamber and was pronounced dead by a doctor after taking 10 bullets. But as they brought one of her accomplices into the room, Chaovaret and the guards heard her scream in the tiny morgue. Not only that, she was trying to stand up. All hell broke loose.

”One of the escorts rolled her over and pressed down on her back to accelerate the bleeding and help her die,” wrote Chaovaret. ”Another escort, a real hard man, tried to strangle her to finish her off, but I swept his arms away in disgust.”

After they executed one of her accomplices, the doctor found that the woman was still breathing. He ordered the guards to tie her back on the cross and this time they used the full clip of 15 bullets to ensure she was dead.

Chaovaret’s experience on the firing line and ability to keep a cool head resulted in his promotion to the rank of executioner in 1984. He always said he did not want the job and only did it because it meant more money for his family.

Susan Aldous, author of the The Angel of Bang Kwang Prison, about her humanitarian work in Thailand’s largest maximum-security facility, sees it a different way. ”When they asked him to become the executioner, I think they appealed to his sense of masculinity. Do you think you’re tough enough to do this job? Before that, he was a low-ranking nobody, but that promotion gave him a sense of importance.”

Having interviewed him in the prison and seen him socially, I often thought he enjoyed the notoriety of his job. In between spells of playing surf instrumentals and Elvis covers on his acoustic guitar in the jail, he would take stabs at himself.

”I wasn’t handsome or talented enough to make it as a musician,” he would say.

This contradictory character, who later became the chief of foreign affairs at Bang Kwang, overseeing as many as 800 foreign inmates, was the only person in Bangkok that Aldous trusted to take care of her daughter.

”We used to joke that the executioner was her nanny.” He also helped Aldous to untangle the prison’s red tape so that she could run programmes for the dying and nearly blind.

”He would show me how to do the paperwork and he’d get the signatures. Then I’d be hugging all these Aids patients and he’d make all these jokes about how disgusting it was and that I was so ugly that this was the best I could get. But when the other male guards were not around, I’d look over and see him with a few tears in his eyes.”

Chaovaret did have a conscience. He also believed in karma. Before each execution, he would pray to a powerful spirit for forgiveness. He was not killing the man out of malice, he said, but because it was his duty. The 2,000 baht he received for each execution he religiously donated to a royal temple in Nonthaburi.

The final book he co-authored, A Secret History of the Bangkok Hilton, was with Pornchai Sereemongkonpol. At the start of this year, Pornchai saw him for the last time. ”He was in a wheelchair and quite bloated, but still in good spirits and cracking jokes. He always had a good sense of humour. I remember him telling me once that his daughter found it difficult to get dates because all the guys knew what her father did,” he said.

Not long before he passed away, his wife held a special Buddhist rite to appease the spirits of the 55 men and women who ended up in his gun sights. She asked them to let him die in peace and not interfere with his reincarnation.

Jim Algie has written about the late executioner in Bizarre Thailand: Tales of Crime, Sex and Black Magic (Marshall Cavendish International, 2010).

Although 470 cellphones used by inmates have been retrieved in the past month from multiple searches of the Nakhon Si Thammarat provincial prison, 11 more were discovered yesterday hidden in plastic water bottles, along with crystalline meth dissolved in soft drinks.

A clear type of ‘ice’ flakes was mixed with water and injected into beverage cans that were neatly resealed. Once smuggled into the prison or received by inmates, the flakes would be sun-dried and ground into a powder for reuse or resale to buyers inside the prison.

Suraphol Kaewparadai, the new chief warden, said he believes that many phones remain hidden inside the prison, possibly buried or stashed in small corners and holes in buildings, and the searches would continue.

After 39 more handsets were found in three concrete blocks, all 230 blocks brought in for a construction project will be confiscated and inspected.

All food supplies in all types of containers that are delivered, even for guards, will be inspected and weighed to ensure they contain nothing else.

Senior warden Thaworn Santajit said this procedure would be strictly followed.

The people who brought in the 39 mobile phones have been identified. Some are prison guards suspended from work and others are still at work, Pol Lt Colonel Kornkoj Chumsri said.

“They were involved in the construction project, the purchase of the bricks and other materials, and we know who they are,” he said.

After 13 guards were transferred out for involvement in various irregularities, the 178 remaining on duty have been complaining about the extra workload and demanding the immediate recruitment of guards from other prisons to help them.

The Corrections Department is requesting 450 Border Patrol police to help with the burden at nine prisons including the one at Nakhon Si Thammarat.

The extra men will be available in two weeks, said Kobkiat Kasiwiwat, deputy director-general of the department, after meeting with Border Police commanders.

After spending almost two decades in a Thai prison, a Joburg drug mule admitted he lied to his family about what he was doing when he was caught trying to smuggle heroin out of that country.

Alexander “Shani” Krebs returned to Joburg on Saturday, after serving 18 years in Bangkok’s Bang Kwang Prison for trying to smuggle 1.2kg of heroin back to SA.

He was arrested at Bangkok’s international airport on April 26, 1994 – a day before SA’s first democratic elections.

At the time, Krebs claimed that a man he met while holidaying in Thailand had given him a bag to bring back to SA, saying that it contained foreign currency.

But speaking from his sister’s Orange Grove home this week, Krebs said he had lied to his family about what he believed was in the bag. “I was too ashamed,” he said.

Now that he is home, Krebs is working on a book, Dragons and Butterflies, which he says will reveal everything about his actions, arrest and his time in prison.

“It’s been so overwhelming being back,” he said. “My sister took me grocery shopping on Sunday and I was shocked at how expensive everything was. But it’s nice to see how South Africa’s become so integrated.

“I went out with friends on Saturday night and I was amazed to see so many people of different races getting along. We’re now a progressive society and I’m ready to embrace that.”

Krebs was initially sentenced to death by the Thai court, but this was reduced to 100 years after he pleaded guilty to drug trafficking.

“My sister was with me when I was sentenced, and I tried to put on a brave face for her sake, but it was like a dream,” he said. “You can’t process the idea of life in prison.”

Taken straight to Bang Kwang Prison, Krebs had to get used to a new country, a new language, and being thrown into a small cell.

At first, his only means of communication with his family was through written letters, but these took a long time as they all had to be censored.

After a few years, he was allowed to make two phone calls a week.

“At one stage we had TV, but no news channels – just movies and some sports,” he said.

“I had no access to current events, so it was quite a shock coming home. I had no idea what to expect and how South Africa had changed. But when I landed on Saturday, I felt like I was home.”

Speaking of his experience in prison, Krebs described the food as inedible, although foreign prisoners received slightly better fare.

“We got a plastic bag filled with rice, and another filled with stew, some vegetables, and just bones,” he said.

“Most prisoners received money from their families, and were allowed to buy food from outside, so only about a third of them were eating prison food.”

Krebs said the prisoners formed “eating groups”, and would share food with each other.

Adapt

Krebs also had to adapt to simple activities, like showering. “The shower water was pumped directly from a river, so sometimes there were small fish in the water,” he said. “We also had to buy bottled water from outside.”

When Krebs and the other prisoners were not in their cells, they were allowed outside to play sport. “I ended up coaching a prison soccer team.”

But during the 15-hour lock-up, there would sometimes be up to 26 prisoners in a cell.

On the violence in prison, he said: “I did witness a few killings, but Thai prisons have a unique punishment for violence. They put you in solitary confinement and then move you to another building. But the Thais didn’t interfere with the foreigners.”

As time dragged on, Krebs missed the simple things – the things he took for granted before, from switching on a light and having clean water, to having physical contact with someone he loved – even just holding hands.

Krebs said meeting other foreigners was what kept him going.

“At one point I had to go to the hospital, and they were marching some of the female prisoners past. I saw this woman and thought I recognised her. I called out to her, but she must have thought I was a sex maniac or something because she just ignored me.

“When she walked back I told her I was South African, and she said she was too. That’s the only contact we ever had.”

Krebs said he had always advocated that foreigners stick together. “There were a lot of Nigerian prisoners there, and they stayed together, so I took an example from them.”

But sometimes Krebs felt ashamed to be South African, because he knew his country would never help him.

“Other countries have a treaty with Thailand so that their prisoners can go home to serve their sentences.

“South Africa has no such treaty. I wished I was American because American prisoners always got out so quickly.

“An American was arrested at the same time I was, and he had double the amount of heroin with him. But he spent just over four years in prison and then went home, while I was sentenced to death.”

A few family visits also kept Krebs going, but he found these too emotional. “I told them not to come any more,” he said. “It was expensive for them to travel and I preferred they sent me money for food.”

Looking back, Krebs said prison had changed him completely. “Prison reveals your strengths and weaknesses. I evolved so much. I became an artist, realising what my purpose was. I learnt to put the needs of others before mine.”

Krebs’s fear that he would die in prison dissolved when he was granted amnesty.

“There were several amnesties granted to foreign prisoners on King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s “special days”, such as birthdays and anniversaries,” he said.

“Last year my sentence was already down to 21 years, seven months. In December, it was reduced again to 17 years, 11 months, and 26 days, meaning my sentence ended on April 22.”

Krebs made many friends in prison, and is now having difficulty being alone in a room. “A lot of the friends I made are still there serving their sentences, so when I left, I felt like I left a part of my soul there.”

It has come to light that a fair amount of contraband seized during searches of Nakhon Si Thammarat Central Prison was smuggled in with the aid of prison officials. As can be seen here, guards are always searched before they can enter the prison. Money and mobile phones have to be left outside in lockers.

Prison authorities from Nakhon Si Thammarat have confiscated more than 300 mobile phones in recent raids. On some of these they have found pictures taken by the prisoners of drug activity inside the prison.