The arrest of Chow Hok Kuen, 28, a Hong Kong-born British citizen of Taiwanese extraction - who was nabbed in his Bangkok hotel room last month with urned, tattooed and embroidered foetuses wrapped in gold leaf in his suitcase - sent ripples of revulsion and disbelief around the world. The case is, however, merely the latest in a series of grisly revelations involving sayasut, or black magic, and a belief in the magical powers of grilled babies - a practice, police say, that has spread beyond Southeast Asia. Chow told police he had bought the foetuses for 200,000 baht (HK$49,000) and that he made regular trips to Thailand to procure khumon tong, or 'golden children', to sell for up to six times as much once he had smuggled them into Taiwan. In some Chinese communities, preserved foetuses are believed to bring good luck and are kept in shrines within homes or businesses. Chow faces up to a year in jail and a fine of 2,000 baht for possession of the foetuses, which, police say, showed development of between two and eight months. That's hardly a deterrent to other baby 'body snatchers', given that Chow boasts he sold one well-preserved foetus to a Chinese businessman for 30 million baht. Wiwat Kamchamnan, an inspector with the Royal Thai Police, said Chow was the self-professed 'leading master of witchcraft' in East Asia, with a website advertising his services. Baby grilling has its origins in 19th-century poet Sunthon Phu's quasi-historical epic Khun Chang, Khun Phaen. The eponymous Phaen, a soldier during the reign of King Ramathibodi II (1491-1529), grills the foetus of his own stillborn son. It becomes his talisman, protecting and advising him as his fortunes wax. Buddhism frowns on occult practices but an undercurrent of animism pervades Thailand, especially in rural areas, where it's common to see people rubbing magic trees in the hope lottery numbers will be revealed or clutching lucky wooden phalluses. Last year, three people were jailed after the corpses of more than 2,000 foetuses were found at the temple morgue where they worked. A khumon tong racket was suspected. In 2006, renegade monk Harn Raksajit was jailed for 100 years for raping 25 women who had sought his services as a khumon tong expert. This followed a jail term and defrocking for the procurement of foetuses from abortion clinics. He also boasted that he made millions of baht selling num man prai, oil from the chin of grilled babies, as a love potion. A Taipei undertaker told Reuters following Chow's arrest that smugglers of dead infants into Taiwan made profits by melting gold and infusing it into the bodies as a gold-smuggling ruse, or by filling the corpse with wax to prevent decomposition, allowing them to sell it at 'a very high price'. He said a stillborn child's soul could hurt people, especially its parents, so the dead baby must be handled carefully. 'I believe this is the world's first body-snatcher bust involving the commercial trade in foetuses,' Wiwat said.
