It gives me great pleasure to announce the death of Lt General Manas Kongpan, disgraced and bereft in a Thai prison, the most evil man I have encountered in 30 years of journalism...
Manas died Wed in a prison hospital. He got off lightly. In 2009, reporters Alan Morison & Chutima Sidasathian came to @SCMPNews with a tale so hideous it seemed impossible: The Thai military was secretly towing #Rohingya refugees out to sea on wrecks & casting them adrift...
@SCMPNews Hundreds were dying under the most nightmarish circumstances. Skeletal men, baked to death by the tropical sun in excrement-filled hulks, as they drifted. Dying of thirst, starvation. Drowning. How many? We'll never know
Alan and Chutima trusted me as the SCMP's foreign editor with remarkable material, provided by a brave source inside the military: photographic proof of the policy, with Manas in charge. Here he is on the prison island where the refugees were held before being sent to their doom
These were photos taken by the military to document their secret murderous process. Photos of men who were never seen alive again. The banal mechanics of evil
Eventually, the Thai govt was shamed enough to halt this illegal policy. But Manas? Initially he got promoted! And Alan and Chutima got sued by the military for defamation (they won, thank god)
But fate caught up with this monster. In 2015 he was arrested & later jailed for new atrocities: Rohingya were being held in secret jungle prisons, and ransomed back to their impoverished families. Those whose families couldn't pay ended up in a mass grave scmp.com/news/asia/sout…
So farewell Gen Manas, you oxygen thief, you killer, you profiteering piece of filth. As a devout Buddhist, you believed in reincarnation. May you suffer more for your crimes in the next life, than you did in this one. And may those you tortured find you, to speed you on your way
I feel I should add this: no story has affected me so deeply, as these crimes were unfolding in real time as we reported them. Reporter @GregTorode was sent racing over the Andaman Sea to the island where we knew the refugees were held; too late, he found just campfires
Greg shouted over mobile phone the tragic news, amid the din of the boat engine & waves: the refugees were gone. I informed the UNHCR. It was the night of Obama's inauguration. As he was sworn in, I went into the deputy editor's office & cried for 20 minutes
Anyway enough of that
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