Ex-wife jailed for Briton's murder

12 April 2012

A Thai woman and three accomplices have been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of the woman's British ex-husband, whose charred remains were found scattered in a national park.

The Petchaburi provincial court convicted Panatda Raolueang and three of her neighbours of premeditated murder in the killing of Toby Charnaud, 41.

Charnaud disappeared in March 2005 after going to pick up his son at the home of his ex-wife in Petchaburi, 65 miles south-west of Bangkok.

He was beaten with an iron rod before his killers burned his body and scattered the ashes in a park near Raolueang's home.

Panatda, her two relatives and a neighbour - Bunthiam Phuiphong, 31, Chatri Sriprathum, 28, and Niphit Satabut, 27 - pleaded guilty to killing Charnaud, but said they were provoked and had not planned to kill him.

Two other defendants denied the charge.

Charnaud met Panatda when she was a security guard in Bangkok and married her in 1997.

They went to England to live with Charnaud's parents for three years, but returned to Thailand where Charnaud bought two bars in the popular beach resort town of Hua Hin. The couple had a son.

He divorced Panatda in 2004 because she had an affair with a Thai police officer and her gambling habit had plummeted the couple into massive debt. Their four-year-old son was under Charnaud's custody, but the boy regularly visited his mother.

Judge Sarayuth Busayanawin said Panatda was "guilty of hiring other people to commit murder".

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