Ulong Saepan was sitting in the back of his neighbour's truck heading home on a mountain trail when the driver slowed down to check why a thin rope was stretched across the road.
The 48-year-old father was returning from his first council meeting at a nearby village and was anxious to tell his family about his first day on the job. He never made it. The jungle silence was shattered by an eruption from the trees. Several men armed with M16 machine guns sprayed the truck with hundreds of rounds, tearing apart Ulong and five other ethnic Yao men.
It happened because the driver Kiattisak Saksrichompoo, 46, was allegedly on a Thai government blacklist and targeted for execution in the three-month campaign to eliminate suspected drug dealers in 2003.
The others were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
'The hill-tribe people were being killed like pigs and dogs,' said Wiwat Tamee, head of the Highland People's Task Force, as he helped a relative of the dead fill out a request to reopen the case. The human rights worker recently returned to the hillside hamlet of Ban Pang Khon to help the National Human Rights Commission investigate one of the thousands of attacks carried out during deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra's deadly 2003 operation, dubbed his war on drugs.
Now the post-coup government, headed by Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont, has launched a six-month probe to reinvestigate 40 of the unsolved murder cases originally completed by the rights commission, but ignored by the previous government.
The official death toll during the three-month campaign to eliminate amphetamine dealers is 2,598, but international rights groups estimate the toll to be twice that number.