In a triumph of international policing that has Whitehall mandarins patting themselves so hard on the back they’ve bruised their own vertebrae, a chubby-cheeked Australian goblin has been collared in Thailand for allegedly stuffing his girlfriend into a suitcase and checking her into the great airport in the sky. The suspect, one Daniel ‘Don’t Call Me Dingo’ Jones, was nicked in a Patong massage parlour where he was allegedly attempting to sweat out the guilt while a Thai masseuse worked on his knots. Scotland Yard, in a rare display of competence that didn’t involve losing a washing machine, have praised ‘exemplary cooperation’ with Thai authorities.
But let’s not get misty-eyed, dear reader. This is the same Yard that once lost a murder weapon in a skip and blamed it on a badger. The real hero here is the Thai police, who presumably solved the case by following the trail of half-drunk Chang bottles and bewildered backpacker complaints about ‘that weird bloke dragging a heavy suitcase at 3am’.
Jones, a former bricklayer from Brisbane, is accused of strangling his 24-year-old companion in a Krabi hotel room before attempting to check her into oblivion as ‘excess baggage’. The UK’s role? They sent a sternly worded email and a constable whose main job was to ensure the extradition papers didn’t get mixed up with a curry order.
The Foreign Office, true to form, issued a statement that was 90% jargon and 10% breeze. ‘We commend the Thai authorities for their diligence in this matter,’ they bleated, conveniently forgetting that British police once arrested a man for wearing novelty socks. Still, Jones now faces the prospect of either a Thai prison made of bamboo and bad karma, or an Australian one full of drop bears and irate flies.
Either way, justice is done. The suitcase, meanwhile, has been impounded for ‘evidence’ which likely means it’ll be auctioned off on eBay by the end of the week. So raise a glass of warm Singha to international law enforcement, the only global collaboration more tangled than a Bangkok traffic jam.
Just don’t pack your loved ones in anything smaller than a cabin bag. It’s bad form.
