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Russian Women Shot in Pattaya

This story has been all over the Russian news for the last week or two, along with grisly TV pictures:

THE bodies of two young Russian women, apparently shot by the Thai mafia, were found slumped in deckchairs on the beach at Pattaya, one of Thailand’s most popular resorts, early yesterday.

Police said the corpses were discovered by a hotel security guard, who saw a Thai man run from the scene, jump onto a motorcycle and roar off into the night. Purses and mobile phones were left on the bodies, suggesting that robbery was not a motive.

I took an interest in this story because the murders took place days after we left Pattaya, and on Jomtien Beach which is where our hotel was located. According to the Russian news, they have caught the chap responsible and he has spilled the beans as to the motive. Apparently, a Russian chap living in Pattaya but married to a Thai woman had been taking the unfortunate Russian women out to a few clubs and bars in the days before they were shot. The Thai woman then got jealous and paid a local hitman to kill the two Russian women.

This is an unusual story in some ways, first and foremost for the fact that a Russian man has married a Thai woman. Russian men, in contrast to Europeans, generally aren’t that interested in foreign women, and very rarely dark-skinned Oriental women. A Russian man with a Thai wife must have been unusual in Pattaya. Secondly, shooting a couple of tourists who’d been stepping out with her husband seems a bit of an overreaction on the part of the wife. Maybe there was something more going on. Either way, she’d have been better off shooting her husband or boiling his daughter’s bunny rabbit rather than arranging the murder of a couple of unsuspecting tourists.