Thailand’s junta leader Prayuth Chan-ocha has called for a whistleblowing police officer who fled to Australia to return, promising to punish influential figures the officer said want to kill him for exposing their role in human trafficking.
“Tell me now, who threatened you? It is no matter how big they are, I will have them punished,” Prayuth told reporters.
Police Major General Paween Pongsirin told Guardian Australia and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation last week that he was in Melbourne to claim political asylum after he found senior members in the military and police were involved in the illicit trade.
“I don’t understand why he [Paween] has to flee and seek political asylum in Australia. He should come home to file lawsuits against the alleged persons,” Prayuth added.
On Monday, Thailand’s deputy head of the attorney general’s human trafficking case office, Prayuth Sattayarak, suggested Paween might testify against the alleged aggressors via a video-link, according to the local Nation news website.
The offers to help Paween sit in stark contrast to comments on Friday by Royal Thai police chief Jakthip Chaijinda, who said police were considering a defamation case against Paween, a criminal charge in Thailand.
The police say Paween never filed internal complaints when he was allegedly threatened.
Dismayed by being blacklisted in a US report for the second consecutive year for not combatting modern-day slavery, Thailand said it had made “tangible progress”.
The south-east Asian nation pressed charges against more than 100 people, including an army general, on counts of human trafficking after dozens of bodies were found in a jungle prison camp earlier this year.
Many of the exhumed bodies were believed to be Rohingya Muslims, a long-persecuted minority who have been fleeing Myanmar.
Paween led the investigation and he said he uncovered a major human trafficking syndicate but that “from the beginning” he was under pressure not to pursue the perpetrators too enthusiastically.
He resigned from the force last month after he was transferred against his will to an insurgency-plagued region in the deep south of Thailand. He said traffickers he was pursuing were influential in this region and “senior police” in the area were involved. He told his superiors that he feared for his life, but says his protests were ignored.
Paween did not name the senior officials he alleges are complicit in the human trafficking trade.
The investigation he led was disbanded after just five months, although Thai police say witnesses in human-trafficking cases will testify next week and throughout 2016 in an ongoing case.
