Tag Archives: shooting spree

Mass shooting puts Thai army officers’ side deals under scrutiny

By Panu Wongcha-um

NAKHON RATCHASIMA, Thailand (Reuters) – A Thai soldier’s killing of 29 people in a rage over a housing deal involving his superior officer has brought attention to the business dealings of army personnel in a country that just emerged from direct military rule.

Thailand’s army chief has promised to investigate and also acknowledged a wider problem of inappropriate business deals involving army officers and their subordinates, vowing to root out the practise.

The military, which staged its latest coups 2006 and 2014, wields extraordinary power in Thailand and proclaims its discipline to justify repeatedly overthrowing elected governments, but the killings on the weekend put a spotlight on some of its own members’ questionable dealings.

Sergeant Major Jakrapanth Thomma was meeting on Saturday with his commanding officer and the officer’s mother-in-law to discuss their dispute when he opened fire, killing both of them. He then drove to his army camp, a Buddhist temple and a shopping mall, gunning people down until security forces killed him on Sunday morning.

Hours before, Jakrapanth had posted on Facebook denouncing people who cheated others to become wealthy.

“Do they think they can spend the money in hell?” Jakrapanth asked.

The military has a long tradition of involvement in business and it has been an open secret that some officers branch out into private business deals.

“It is actually quite common for senior military officers to be involved in real estate, especially in Thailand’s rural areas,” said Paul Chambers, a politics expert at Naresuan University in northern Thailand.

The military is one of the largest land-holders in some provinces, controlling vast bases that also can be mini-cities unto themselves.

“Many officers tend to want to supplement their meager salaries with money they can easily make through military power regarding real estate,” Chambers said.

Military discipline is regularly extolled by Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, who launched the last coup in 2014 and last year retained power by leading a pro-army party to victory in an election opposition parties said was engineered to cement army influence.

One prominent opposition group, the Future Forward Party, has openly opposed military influence over politics, arguing for changes in the military-written constitution, an end to conscription and cutting the army budget.

‘INJUSTICE’

Army chief General Apirat Kongsompong has said he will set up a direct line for soldiers who feel they are being exploited by superior officers.

“The cause and reason for the perpetrator in this incident were the injustice he received from his commanding officer and relatives,” Apirat said in a press briefing on Tuesday.

He also acknowledged wider reports of officers exploiting a system of military housing loans and welfare schemes for personal gain.

“There are cooperation between units and private contractor that lobby for deals,” Apirat said

“I know about this and I want to assure that in the next three months some generals and colonels will lose their jobs,” he said.

Details of the deal that enraged Jakrapanth are not clear, but it appears to have involved his purchase of a house, brokered by the mother-in-law of his commanding officer, Colonel Anantharot Krasae.

Police told Reuters that Jakrapanth argued he was owed 50,000 baht ($1,600) by the mother-in-law, whose husband said she had already given the money to an agent who failed to pass it on to the soldier. Members of the family did not respond to messages from Reuters.

However, lawyer Atchariya Ruangrattanapong, said the dispute may have been over a larger amount – 375,000 baht ($12,000) – and said he has been approached since the shooting by 20 other members of Jakrapanth’s unit complaining about the same scheme.

“Apart from this group, I have been informed that there are hundreds of other soldiers who are scammed in a similar situation,” said Atchariya.

‘CLOSED KINGDOM’

Defense Ministry spokesman Kongcheep Tantrawanit acknowledged reports of officers profiting from sweetheart deals but said the issue was endemic in society.

“All this is an ongoing problem that not just the army but also the government faces,” Kongcheep said.

But the military has a lack of transparency beyond other institutions that makes it easier to exploit the system, said Anusorn Unno, a lecturer at Thammasat University.

“The army is like a closed kingdom,” Anusorn said.

“Those with higher ranks have the advantage in doing business within this closed system.”

The Bangkok Post said in an editorial that questionable personal deals were “the tip of the iceberg” and argued the military budget should be subject to independent audits, instead of the internal ones established by the last ruling junta.

“Without allowing greater external audits, the army risks harboring more and more shady operations.”

(Writing by Kay Johnson; Editing by Robert Birsel)

U.S. high court takes up sentencing appeal in ‘D.C. Sniper’ case

FILE PHOTO : 18-year old sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo is surrounded by deputies as he is brought into court to be identified by a witness during the trial of sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad at the Virginia Beach Circuit Court in Virginia Beach, Virginia, U.S., October 22, 2003. REUTERSDavis Turner/POOL/File Photo

By Lawrence Hurley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to consider whether a man serving life in prison over his role in a deadly 2002 shooting spree in the Washington area should be resentenced because he was only 17 years old at the time.

The nine justices will hear an appeal filed by the state of Virginia objecting to a lower court’s decision ordering that Lee Boyd Malvo’s sentence of life in prison without parole in the so-called D.C. Sniper crimes be thrown out. If Malvo wins, he and other prison inmates in similar cases involving certain crimes committed by minors could receive more lenient sentences.

Malvo and an older accomplice, John Allen Muhammad, shot dead 10 people over three weeks in Washington, Maryland and Virginia. Muhammad also was convicted and was executed in 2009 at age 48 in a Virginia state prison.

Virginia appealed in the Malvo case after the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in June 2018 that he should be resentenced. The appeals court cited Supreme Court decisions issued since the shooting spree finding that mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles were unconstitutional, and that this rule applied retroactively.

Malvo, 34, received four life sentences in Virginia, where he was convicted of two murders and later entered a separate guilty plea to avoid the death penalty. He also received a sentence of life in prison without parole in Maryland.

The appeals court called these crimes “the most heinous, random acts of premeditated violence conceivable.” Malvo and Muhammad were arrested when police found them sleeping at a Maryland rest area in a Chevrolet Caprice after a frantic search over crimes that panicked the U.S. capital region.

The appeal concerns the scope of a 2012 decision in which the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that mandatory life sentences without parole in homicide cases involving juvenile killers violated the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In 2016, the court decided that the 2012 ruling applied retroactively, enabling people imprisoned years ago to argue for their release.

Malvo’s appeal concerns whether the earlier rulings do not apply only to people facing automatic life without parole sentences but also to instances in which a judge had discretion over what sentence to impose. Courts across the United States are divided on that question.

The justice who cast the pivotal vote in the 2012 case, Anthony Kennedy, retired last year. His replacement, President Donald Trump’s conservative appointee Brett Kavanaugh, could have an important role in the eventual ruling.

Malvo’s Maryland sentence would not be directly affected by the outcome in the Virginia dispute.

The justices on Monday also took up two other criminal cases.

One centers on whether the Constitution requires jury verdicts to be unanimous. In that case, 10 of 12 jurors agreed the defendant was guilty in a 2016 Louisiana murder conviction.

Louisiana and Oregon at the time were the only states that allowed such split verdicts – which would end in a hung jury elsewhere – but Louisiana voters last November approved a state constitutional amendment to end the practice for serious felonies, starting this year.

The other case, involving a death sentence for a 2009 murder in Kansas, challenges limitations that some states impose on the defense arguing that the accused person was insane when committing a crime.

The Supreme Court will decide the cases in its next term, which begins in October and ends in June 2020.

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Additional reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)

Toronto gunman a puzzle to his own tight-knit immigrant community

FILE PHOTO: Police are seen near the scene of a mass shooting in Toronto, Canada, July 22, 2018. REUTERS/Chris Helgr

By Anna Mehler Paperny and Danya Hajjaji

TORONTO (Reuters) – A close-knit vibrant immigrant community of Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park neighborhood, where Faisal Hussain grew up and went to school, is struggling to square the image of the quiet, skinny boy they knew with the man who went on a shooting spree late on Sunday, killing two and wounding 13.

Hussain would never talk to anybody, said resident Saira Ahmed, who would see him going out for a walk. He worked in a grocery store but spent much of his time at home, according to one neighbor, and attended high school at nearby Marc Garneau Collegiate Institute, another neighbor said.

However, Hussain, 29, struggled with severe mental illness, battled depression and psychosis, his parents, Farooq and Fakhara Hussain, wrote in a statement Monday evening.

Treatments could not fix his mental illness, his parents added. “While we did our best to seek help for him throughout his life of struggle and pain, we could never imagine that this would be his devastating and destructive end.”

On Sunday night, police say, Hussain shot dead an 18-year-old woman and a 10-year-old girl and injured 13 others using a handgun on the bustling Danforth Avenue before he fled an altercation with police and was later found dead.

Eighteen-year-old Reese Fallon had just graduated high school and was looking forward to studying nursing. Police have not identified the 10-year-old.

“Our hearts are in pieces for the victims and for our city as we all come to grips with this terrible tragedy,” Hussain’s parents said. “We will mourn those who were lost for the rest of our lives.”

The Hussains are no strangers to heartbreak, neighbors told Reuters. Their only daughter died following a car accident years ago, and one of their sons has been in a coma for some time. The family, originally from Pakistan, is known to have lived in the apartment for more than 25 years, neighbors said, though Reuters was not able to independently verify it.

Farooq Hussain, known by neighbors to walk the area no matter the season, has had health problems of his own and recently underwent surgery, two neighbors said.

Thorncliffe Park is a community with a high immigrant population, a large part of it South Asian.

(Reporting by Anna Mehler Paperny and Danya Hajjaji; Additional reporting by David Ljunggren in Ottawa; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)