The Bangkok South Criminal Court Tuesday issued warrants for the arrest of two Americans who allegedly attempted to smuggle preserved human body parts stolen from a hospital museum to the United States.
Deputy police chief Ruangsak Jarit-ek said Ryan Edward McPherson, 31, and Daniel Tanner, 33, are wanted on charges of theft of property for public use and illegally attempting to smuggle human tissue out of the country by submitting a false shipping declaration.
Both suspects have already left Thailand.
A tattoo expert and Deputy police chief Pol Gen Ruangsak Jaritek (left) point at one of the pictures of body parts found in parcels as they address reporters at Bang Phongphang police station on Monday. (Reuters photo)
Gen Ruangsak said police asked the court to issue the warrants after obtaining sufficient evidence to prove that the human parts had been stolen from Siriraj Medical Museum at Siriraj Hospital.
He said the Police Foreign Affairs Division had contacted Interpol and would exchange information to try and hunt down the two men, who reportedly are now in Cambodia.
Sombat Milintajinda of the Metropolitan Police Bureau, who is chief investigator on the case, said immigration authorities at all checkpoints have been alerted to keep watch for them.
The suspects had been detained earlier for allegedly attempting to ship home five stolen human parts preserved in formaldehyde after the acrylic boxes of tissue were detected in an X-ray exam at a DHL branch Saturday night. The parcels were destined for Las Vegas.
The two men were released because a criminal background check came back clean, police said. The suspects left Thailand on Sunday morning for Cambodia after arriving in Thailand on Thursday.
In Phnom Penh, Pol Lt Gen Chhay Sinarith, deputy commissioner of the Cambodian Police, said Thailand had not requested a manhunt for the two.
"We have no information and the Thai authorities have not contacted us yet," the Phnom Penh Post quoted him as saying.
Pol Maj Gen Sombat said detectives had requested footage from security cameras at Siriraj Hospital to be used as evidence to take action against the two.
US investigators are trying to determine whether any laws were broken by the two American tourists after the parcels would be mailed to Las Vegas.
FBI spokeswoman Bridget Pappas told The Associated Press Monday that investigators are aware that Mr McPherson and Mr Tanner were questioned after Thai police confiscated the three packages labelled "toys."
AP efforts to reach family members or representatives in the Las Vegas area were unsuccessful.
The district attorney's office in San Diego, California, in 2002 filed felony charges including battery against Mr McPherson and Mr Tanner and two others in connection with production of the Bumfights videos. A judge reduced the counts to misdemeanours and the four pleaded guilty in 2003 to arranging a fight without a permit.
They were fined $500 each and ordered to perform community service at a homeless shelter, but Mr McPherson and one colleague were sentenced to 180 days in jail in 2005 for failing to complete their community service.