A little more than a year after taking up the case of the missing Karen rights activist Porlajee "Billy" Rakchongcharoen, the Department of Special Investigation (DSI) has made noteworthy progress. Yesterday, local media reported that the agency has implicated a senior official and his team in the high-profile case and is seeking arrest warrants for them.
Facing warrants are Chaiwat Limlikit-aksorn, former chief of Kaeng Krachan National Park, and his subordinates. Billy disappeared in April 2014 while in the custody of the ex-park chief who claimed he had actually freed Billy. At the time, the activist was helping his Karen fellows sue Chaiwat for the eviction of villagers who saw their bamboo huts and rice barns reduced to ashes.
Before this, Chaiwat was arrested in 2011 for the suspected murder of a local leader who had thrown his support behind the Karen community. As the trial proceeded, he was dismissed from his state job but was eventually acquitted due to "lack of evidence", and reinstated.
However, the DSI carried out on-site inspections in the park in April and May, and with the use of a sonar-equipped underwater drone, discovered key evidence, an oil barrel, its lid, two steel rods, a burnt piece of wood and two bone fragments, that enabled the agency to conclude that the activist was murdered, a victim of state violence. DNA tests on the bones matched Billy and his mother.
After the DSI started to treat the case as a murder, four park officers and workers were transferred from Kaeng Krachan National Park in September to pave the way for further investigations.
Now, additional evidence points to Chaiwat and his team and the DSI deserves full credit for obtaining this. The former park chief could not be reached for comment but he has insisted on his innocence in the past.
While the justice process will take time to conclude, the DSI's successful work is in stark contrast to that of police as well as prosecutors.
Police in particular owe the public an explanation about why they failed to find the evidence. Was it shoddy work, ignorance or a deliberate cover-up?
More importantly, Billy is not the only victim of state violence. A major unsolved case is that of Muslim human rights lawyer Somchai Neelapaijit who disappeared in 2004.
Several other activists who challenged state abuses of power have vanished mysteriously but there has been no progress in determining their fate.
In the Somchai case, a group of police officers implicated in his disappearance were put on trial but then released and reinstated, again due to "lack of evidence." The DSI later stepped in but failed to find the culprits, and the case remains a mystery while the wrongdoers remain at large.
Despite their enormous manpower, the performance of the police force has not met public expectations, at least in the case of Billy and the other activists who disappeared.
Such repeated failure suggests a strong need for reform of the police force, a promise Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha made during his regime days but has not delivered on.