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SCMP Reporter

These are crunch times indeed for the Thai police effort to satisfactorily solve the execution-style killing of top Australian accountant Michael Wansley.

 In the boldest move since Wansley was shot in March, prosecutors on Wednesday filed conspiracy to murder charges against three executives of a sugar milling company whose vast debt he was seeking to restructure.

 Among them was Kaset Thai managing director Pradit Siriviriyakul, the son of one Thailand's most powerful sugar families.

 The investigative accountant, who had been hired by Kaset Thai's creditors to deal with about US$450 million (HK$3.5 billion) in debts, is understood to have uncovered a host of irregularities.

 Wansley was one of dozens of high-profile auditors helping the Thai economic recovery and police are facing considerable political pressure for a sound and speedy solution.

 But doubts remain whether real justice will be achieved in a country famed for dollar-each-way judicial conclusions, in which a scapegoat is often found to protect the powerful.

 'The laying of formal charges is an encouraging sign, but I will hold my judgment until the end of the court case,' a veteran Western ambassador said.

 'These things have a habit of falling apart at the last hurdle in Thailand. Governments come and go, but the criminal justice system remains despite the best efforts of reformers.'  And in this latest case, the weak link appears to be Pichet Kaewsamduang, the only one of six key suspects still at large.

 Pichet is allegedly the hired killer who shot Wansley eight times from a motorcycle on orders from management in provincial Nakhon Sawan. He can provide some of the most crucial evidence.

 'We are shadowing him constantly and we are confident he will soon be apprehended,' investigation head Police General Prasarn Wongyai said yesterday.

 'The problem is we want to take him alive at all costs. We want to get some information out of him.'  The former communist terrorist is believed to be hiding in a safehouse protected by ex-comrades in Thailand's wild borderlands with Malaysia.



Police pushed to solve murder of Australian