Thai police say they have no information about a missing Chinese journalist who is feared to have been snatched and taken back to China and will only look into the case if the man’s wife reports him missing.
The Chinese journalist, who said he was fed up with life as a government informant and fled China last year, went missing in Thailand on Jan 11, his wife said on Friday, raising concerns he might have been abducted by Chinese agents.
He Fangmei said she last spoke to her husband, Li Xin, when he was riding a train from Bangkok to Nong Khai in northeastern Thailand. She fears he has been taken back to China.
Police spokesman Pol Gen Dejnarong Suthicharnbancha said the wife of the missing Chinese journalist can file a complaint with police if she believes her husband has disappeared.
Pol Gen Dejnarong said police have not acknowledged the case. Foreign Ministry spokesman Sek Wannamethee said the ministry has yet to obtain any information regarding the disappearance of the Chinese journalist.
Mr Li, formerly a website editor for a Chinese media group, fled last October to India, where he said he could no longer bear working as a secret informant for the Chinese government.
He later travelled to Thailand. Mr Li’s wife said he was planning to seek asylum before he went missing.
The missing journalist is the latest in a string of disappearances of China-related activists in Southeast Asia that have raised suspicions of Chinese government involvement.
Last October, Hong Kong publisher Gui Minhai suddenly disappeared from his apartment in Pattaya. Mr Gui reappeared last week on Chinese state television, where he said he returned to China to turn himself in for an old crime.
His friends insist Mr Gui was forcibly taken away.
Four other people connected to the same Hong Kong publishing company, which sells books banned in China about Chinese politics and politicians, have disappeared.
One of them, Lee Bo, said he returned voluntarily to mainland China in notes to his wife, but supporters believe he was kidnapped and smuggled to the mainland.
Beijing also took back the teenage son of a detained rights lawyer after he fled from China to Myanmar.
After arriving in India, Mr Li, 37, revealed he was an informant for the government. He said he was coerced into gathering information about fellow activists and journalists after the government detained him for sharing information with the rival Taiwanese government and threatened to imprison
him. Mr Li began his activism when he set up a website devoted to building civil society in 2007.