Fighting Crime in South East Asia

It was a large turnout when members of the Nordic Chambers of Commerce gathered at Sheraton Grande Sukhumvit in Bangkok for a breakfast meeting about Nordic police in Thailand. People listened very closely when Swedish police officer Annethe Ahlenius and Danish police officer Mogens Sørensen talked about fighting crime in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and the Philippines. The meeting’s focus was especially on crime in Thailand.

By Sarah Mia Haagerup

The Nordic police in South East Asia cover crime areas such as drugs, financial crimes, human trafficking and sexual abuse against children. According to police officer Annethe, who deals a lot with drug crimes, a lot of the problems they are facing today are letters or parcels with narcotics. Just recently the police discovered a parcel containing two kg of cannabis.

Another widespread crime is money laundering where criminals lure foreigners into buying properties in Thailand. Most often the criminals receive the down payments after which the foreigners discover that their newly bought property is actually a dump and not worth anything at all.

Also human trafficking in South East Asia is a big challenge to the police, as this type of crime is a very lucrative business for the people in charge. In connection with that police often come a cross forged identification papers, often detected because the criminals use the wrong type of numbers in the passports. Annethe and Mogens finished the presentation bringing attention to sexual abuse against children, "which is a very important issue for the police," Annethe said. Most of the victims are homeless, non educated children living on the streets.

Today the police often use images to catch offenders, since images are steadily growing. This was for instance how the police caught a notorious Canadian paedophile some time ago despite the fact that he had blurred his face on the pictures. With the right techniques the police succeeded in clearing up the picture. Also child pornography pay-per-view websites are on the rise and naturally this is an issue the police follows very closely not only in South East Asia but also in Sweden, where child pornography pay-per-view websites are an increasing problem, Annethe explained.

The Nordic police work in close corporation with the Royal Thai Police and several NGOs, among others a non government organisation called FACE - An organisation focusing on child abuse.

The Nordic police encourage everyone to write to the following email address if they have information about children being sexually abused in Thailand. E-mail: nlobangkok@nordlo.in.th