Remembering the disappeared
A year ago, my friend Wanchalearm Satsaksit was kidnapped and probably murdered in Cambodia. This is the story of what happened to him, and the nine other dissidents abducted by the Thai regime.
Around quarter to five in the afternoon on June 4, 2020, Wanchalearm Satsaksit left his apartment in the Mekong Gardens complex in Phnom Penh to buy some meatballs from a street food stall, while chatting to his sister Sitanun on his mobile phone.
Suddenly, several armed men grabbed him and forced him into a dark coloured Toyota Highlander which sped away.
Sitanun heard the commotion over the phone.
“I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,” shouted Wanchalearm, who was known as “Tar” and was 37 years old.
For the next 30 minutes, Sitanun stayed on the call, hearing only muffled sounds. Then the line went dead.
Wanchalearm Satsaksit has never been seen or heard from again.
He was the tenth Thai dissident to vanish from Southeast Asian countries over the past five years. The bodies of two of them have been found. The rest remain missing and are assumed to have been murdered.
Activists gathered in Bangkok and several other cities in Thailand and around the world on June 4 to mark a year since Wanchalearm disappeared.
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