On 21 Nov, Somyot Prueksakasemsuk, editor of Voice of Taksin magazine and red-shirt leader, charged with lèse majesté, was brought to Sa Kaew Provincial Court for the first hearing of prosecution witnesses.
Pol Sen Sgt Maj Kanokrak Tanlo, an officer at the Aranyaprathet Immigration checkpoint in Sa Kaew, was the only prosecution witness for the day. She testified that on the day of the arrest, 30 April 2011, she was on passport control duty when Somyot submitted his passport to depart for Cambodia. When she put his name and identification number into the computer, she found that Somyot was a wanted person with an arrest warrant, so she informed her chief and the immigration investigators contacted the Department of Special Investigation.
The witness told the defense lawyer during cross examination that there were up to 5 border checkpoints along the Thailand-Cambodia border. Currently, many Cambodians and Thais cross illegally because the border between the two countries is mostly ordinary fields which they can walk across. She raised as an example the case of the two yellow shirts, Veera Somkwamkid and his secretary Ratree Pipattanapaibul, who had been arrested and imprisoned in Cambodia for illegally crossing the border. Somyot queued up for the passport check like everyone else, and came with a group of tourists. She had been aware that Somyot was a tour group organizer bringing tourists to the Indochinese countries, she said.
The defense lawyer submitted to the court a copy of Somyot’s passport and had the witness confirm that it was Somyot’s passport which she examined at the checkpoint on the day of the arrest.
According to the passport, Somyot had received a visa from the Cambodian Embassy 4 times during 2010-2011. His first trip to Cambodia was 3-5 April 2010 departing through Suvarnabhumi Airport, and the second and third trips were 3-5 Oct 2010 and 4-6 Dec 2010 through Aranyaprathet. He was arrested on the fourth trip before departure.
‘Instinctively, if one wants to flee or is aware of the risk, a person would not want to go through the immigration checkpoints,’ she told the defense lawyer in court.
Among 40-50 people who attended the court hearing were red shirts from Bangkok and Sa Kaew, as well as Somyot’s wife, a Sa Kaew native, and officials from the EU.
After the hearing, defense lawyer Suwit Thongnual said that the witness hearing today was useful for the preparation of a future bail request for Somyot, which would be the 7th, because it clearly showed that Somyot had never intended to flee as had been alleged by the Department of Special Investigation.
He said that the next hearings would be held in Phetchabun, Nakhon Sawan and Songkhla, and witnesses would include Somyot’s former employee and readers of the Voice of Taksin magazine. He had unsuccessfully objected to the court against having hearings in other provinces as he considered that some witnesses were unimportant and his client might be in danger during the long journeys, particularly in provinces where political conflicts are intense, he said.
Sa Kaew Provincial Court has given an order to send Somyot directly to the next province without sending him back to Bangkok. Therefore, Somyot will likely return to Bangkok after the hearings in the provinces finish, which is February 2012, the lawyer said.
Somyot, in prisoner clothes and shackled, said that living conditions in Sa Kaew prison were better than those of Bangkok Remand Prison in terms of food and environment, but it was crowded and overfilled with prisoners. Its normal capacity is 800 prisoners, but it now has almost 2,000, of which almost 300 were transferred in because of flooding. The prisoners have to squeeze tightly together to sleep, he said.
When he was transported with other inmates from Bangkok Remand Prison in early Nov, the vehicle was so crowded that he had to stand all the way from Bangkok to Sa Kaew, he said.
When asked whether the fact that Surachai Danwatthananusorn wants to combine all cases into one and plead guilty affected his decision to fight his case, he said that it did not, because he ‘had already come halfway’. He believed that he had done nothing wrong, so he could not plead guilty, he said, adding that Surachai’s case was pitiable because Surachai was old and had various health problems.
