The shooting, now claimed to be in self-defence, came just 19 days after the Patong Police had hauled in taxi and tuk-tuk drivers in Patong to ask them to please stop beating and cheating tourists.
That meeting was called after six people comprising tuk-tuk drivers and at least one motorbike taxi driver were filmed viciously beating two tourists from the UAE in front of Malin Plaza in Patong.
If the Patong Police believe they have any form of control over this, they are kidding only themselves. It’s just a few bad apples spoiling the barrel, they always say, but there’s no denying the rot is spreading.
The latest surge in violence follows one airport taxi driver stabbing another after joking got out of hand on May 26, and a bar tout was stabbed to death on Bangla Rd on May 13.
Even at the tail end of the tourism high season, a Patong taxi driver shot dead another taxi driver in broad daylight at a taxi rank on Phra Metta Rd, the main back road through Patong, on March 7.
If anything, Phuket’s illustrious bad boys behind the wheel, the tagline they seem to be wanting, think they are above the law. You can’t blame them, it certainly looks like they are, from smiles while being questioned for homicide over last Sunday’s shooting to taking more than seven months to finally have charges of reckless driving causing death presented after wiping out six vehicles and killing a motorbike rider while carrying a tourist as passenger from Phuket airport during morning rush hour traffic.
And Phuket Provincial Police Commander Maj Gen Wisan Panmanee this week said that if police had failed to catch at least one of the two Chinese men who used a fake taxi ploy to kidnap and rob a Chinese woman of B200,000 while on holiday in Phuket it could have “caused very much damage to the image of Phuket and Thailand, and to [the image of] taxi drivers and the tourism industry”?
You have got to be kidding. Gen Wisan, that ploy was planned a long time ago in China. The tourists brought the crime with them.
But when it comes to hailing a ride in a Phuket tuk-tuk or taxi, tourists have no idea what type of person is smiling at them in the rear-view mirror.