PHUKET: Police charged three foreigners with recklessness causing death related to the high-rise plunge of a Russian woman in Patong district late last month.
Pol Lt Gen Amphon Buarapphon, commissioner of Provincial Police Region 8, said on Wednesday that American Smith Antwaun, 38, Jordanian Ahmad Alatoom, 28, and Russian Natalia Kosenkova, 35, faced the charge.
The dead woman, Evgeniia Smirnova, 37, fell to her death from the eighth floor of a condominium on May 31.
Pol Lt Gen Amphon said Smirnova was very drunk while in the company of three other foreigners at the condominium.
The three friends told police she was intoxicated when she climbed an outside staircase between the seventh and eighth floors, the commissioner said. An autopsy found a very high alcohol level in her blood, he said.
After reviewing existing evidence and witnesses' accounts, police determined that all four foreigners had behaved recklessly, and the three arrested earlier for possession of marijuana were then charged with recklessness causing death, Pol Lt Gen Amphon said.
However, police had not concluded their investigation and were collecting evidence in case there were grounds for a murder charge. Detectives were looking for any sign of a dispute or physical assault among the foreigners, the commissioner said.
He said Evgeniia had arrived in Phuket in April and had travelled from and to Phuket repeatedly since then.