Land ownership of prison guards checked
Police in Nakhon Si Thammarat are monitoring the ownership and transfer of land plots owned by prison guards suspected of being bought with money from bribes paid by drug-dealing inmates.
Officials vow to seize any properties found to have been acquired with illegal money.
The land plots, mostly rubber plantations totalling 200 rai (32 hectares) and located in Surat Thani and Chumphon, are owned by guards working at the Nakhon Si Thammarat provincial prison, where a crackdown is underway.
Many of the plots have been sold hurriedly or have had their ownership transferred to others at short notice.
More than 300 mobile phones have been found in recent prison searches. Conversations have been extracted from 25 of them so far and police are asking service providers to assign new teams of technicians to assist with their investigations, said provincial police chief Pol Maj-General Ronnaphong Saikaew.
He said the Nakhon Si Thammarat prison had served as a network for more than half of the entire in-prison drug dealing across the country, and extracting details from the phones or SIM cards would provide information essential to the crackdown.
The officer also said members of the media covering the drug crackdown at the Nakhon Si Thammarat prison or elsewhere would be protected by police and those wanting extra protection could request it. He was responding to reporters’ concerns after they were interviewed by Corrections Department officials at a news conference yesterday.
A deputy Corrections Department director-general, Kobkiat Kasiwiwat, paraded 11 prison guards suspected of helping with in-prison drug dealing at the news conference and interviewed members of the media covering the crackdown and recorded their profiles. The reporters later questioned why they were exposed to the guards and expressed worry over their safety after their identities were shown to the guards.
