A British man is believed to have been beaten to death aboard his yacht off the Thai coast while his wife was locked in the cabin.
Malcolm Robertson, 64, was sailing with his wife, Linda, near to the Thai-Malaysian border when three men clambered aboard and attacked them early this morning.
Thai police say that the couple, from St Leonards, East Sussex, were overpowered and Mrs Robertson was locked in the cabin. When she managed to get out, she found blood on the decks, but no sign of her husband. She waved down a passing vessel and the police were called.
On their way to the yacht, the police spotted three men in a dinghy that had been attached to the Robertsons’ yacht. The men, all Burmese, have been arrested on suspicion of murder and a police spokesman said that the men - migrant workers - confessed to the killing. The body has still not yet been found.
The Robertsons’ next of kin have been informed, and family members were on their way to Thailand last night. A police spokesman said that Mrs Robertson had been beaten and was recovering in hospital. “One British national has been reported missing and another British national is in hospital," a Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokeswoman said.
Piracy along the Malaysia-Thai sea boundary was common in the 1990s, but intensive patrols by the marine police of both nations reduced the number of attacks.
There was no indication of the ethnicity of the three Burmese men detained for the murder of Mr Robertson, but each year hundreds of Rohingya men make the perilous journey along the coast from Burma to Malaysia looking for work.
Earlier this year there was an international outcry when it was claimed that the Thai military was detaining boatloads of Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim minority in Burma, removing the engines from their vessels and towing them back out to sea where an unknown number drowned.
Source:the times
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