WELL, MOST PEOPLE WOULD LEAVE.

Going up against any of Thailand’s elite will cost you dearly and going up one of the foreign cashed up classes who can negotiate for his own son by dealing direct with Thailand’s power brokers will cost you the same – especially if any of those cashed up classes known the oriental solutions.

Never mind that you have CCTV footage proving your adversaries are lying. The recent attack by a group of thugs on British pensioners Rose and Lewis Owen is only now going through the courts so quickly because of the international outcry which followed the appearance on the net of the indecently violent punching and kicking they got.

Had those attackers been really connected to Thailand’s elite the reputation of Rose and her husband and son would have been totally besmirched by now.

One person however who has not given up is Annie Hansen , the mother of Jack Hansen-Birtel who was brutally attacked in the part police owned club – the Green Mango – on the Thai holiday island of Koh Samui in June 2014.
Just about everything the Thai police and justice system could throw at them has been thrown since the Chinese millionaire father of the principal alleged attacker intervened.
And now an attempt to start an investigation into the whole tawdry business has been thwarted once again by the Royal Thai Police.
An investigation into how the Thai Justice system reversed a serious assault case against Jack’s attackers and put Jack and his family through hell has been blocked by a classic ‘Catch 22’ – getting the Thai police to authorise an investigation against itself.
Police and prosecutors have forced Jack’s family to spend fortunes to get a fair hearing for their case.
And after the intervention of Raymond Nobu Chang, a millionaire graduate of the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (The Harvard-Kennedy School), police have done their utmost to charge Jack himself with a minor assault.

At the moment the two alleged attackers Raymond Chang junior, a student at Cornell University and Ryan Wang his friend, have been excused by the court to attend their own trial. But the undisputed victim* Jack, a student at Monash University, Melbourne, has to fly to attend or a warrant of arrest will be issued.

It is hard for a case to get uglier than this and the FBI offered to conduct an investigation into the matter. There was concern, heaven forbid, that a US national might be involved in corrupt practices. The catch was that the Foreign Affairs Department of the Royal Thai Police had to make a formal complaint.

The campaign ‘Justice for Jack’ has posted today on Facebook explaining the current problems.
Needless to say the Foreign Affairs Department did nothing. And the FBI may not be chasing this one. A Colonel in the Foreign Affairs department is however quoted as saying that the family should try ‘social media’ to keep police straight.

(Nor has anything been done about a clear case of perjury, aided and abetted by the law firm Limcharoen which enabled the young Chinese Americans who had graduated from the Shanghai Chinese-American School in Shanghai.

And of course the National Council for Peace and Order (the military junta)  who said they were monitoring the case to ensure transparency – stopped monitoring the case to ensure transparency right after police on Koh Samui bought an airfare and booked a hotel to send an officer to interview Jack in connection with ‘common assault’ -(penalty 1000 baht maximum usually paid on the spot).

Just as Scotland Yard needs the co-operation of the Royal Thai Police, and has been less than frank over the Koh Tao murder investigation, so does the FBI – even though the RTP is a major instigator of crime and recipient of the proceeds of crime in Thailand.

The ‘Justice for Jack’ team has named a very high ranking police officer as the man who it is alleged has been facilitating for the Changs and Wangs.
He is, Pol Gen Pichit Kuandachakupta, former Region 8 Commander in a region encompassing the holiday island of Phuket, Koh Samui, Koh Tao, Koh Phangan – referred to as ‘Thailand’s Bermuda Triangle’ due to the unfortunate loss of lives of tourists in these parts.

He was also on a Senate Committee on Tourism, and is a long standing friend of Chalerm Yubamrung, the Thailand’s infamous police chief and politician one of whose sons escaped a police murder charge.

You can catch up on the Jack Hansen-Bartel case by searching his name with this site.

Meanwhile here is the link to the latest on ‘Justice for Jack’.

Footnote: Limcharoen is the firm which became party to the ‘Emerald Palace’ housing fraud in Pattaya which forced British and Americans to cough up cash despite being swindled in one of those many Pattaya housing scams – and it’s on the British and US Embassy Legal lists – so take the Embassy disclaimers seriously. The company used to be Limcharoen Glanville and Hughes but I believe the foreign element jumped ship.