Police in Thailand are trying to identify a western man made out to look like ‘a heart broken tourist’ whose decapitated head was placed in a plastic bag and left dangling 25 ft below a railing from the city’s showpiece bridge.
Detectives were forced to admit that the death was not self inflicted, despite a clumsy attempt to etch a suicide note on the walkway railing of the gold painted 1.5 mile long Rama VIII suspension bridge in Bangkok at the spot from which the head was suspended.
The note read: ‘Cath, I want but I can not. I came to Bangkok to be you’, and suggested the author may have been a foreign tourist who was jilted in love. But police do not believe the message on the railing.
The jilted English suggests it was written by someone who did not have English as a first language, and was most likely Thai because of the grammatical construction. Police say it could not have been written willingly by the victim.
In Thai a person would literally say ‘I want but can not’. The word ‘have’ is assumed.
Police Colonel Atcharat Heamathanon said: ‘The case has interested the most senior police here.
‘This looks much more like a mafia, or drug related killing. It’s not a suicide. The victim just has been made out to look like a heart-broken tourist’
In a desperate attempt to identify the man Thai police asked newspapers to publish a photograph of the man’s face. Early today millions of Thais woke up to find the decapitated head on the front pages of their newspapers.
The man is Caucasian in his 40’s with close cropped greyish hair. Police are also contacting all western Embassies. The man’s corpse was was found in the river later.
Most foreigners murdered in Thailand are killed because of business dealings which have turned bad. Attacks on tourists are usually opportunistic or prompted by ‘loss of face’.
Last week a 34-yr-old Canadian male model turned property developer was assassinated by two gunmen on the holiday island of Phuket, who pumped seven bullets into him. Francis (Frank) DeGionanni, from Quebec, was suing his property business partner for ?400,000 through the Thai courts.
The most famous bridge hanging was that of Roberto Calvi, ‘God’s banker’ whose body was suspended from Blackfriars Bridge in 1982. But five people were acquitted in Rome of his murder.
Link: http://www.matichon.co.th/khaosod/
Corrections/Updates
Once the forensic investigators had examined the body and head of the victim, their evidence contradicted statements from several Thai police officers, including the one in this story. Suicide, they said, was after all the most likely cause. Further they also identified the man as Maurizio Tosadori from Italy who was down on his luck in Thailand and staying in a guest house in Bangkok’s Samsen Road.
