THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
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Migrant workers’ DNA tested in hunt for girl’s killer

Migrant workers’ DNA tested in hunt for girl’s killer

Police looking for suspects in the murder of an adolescent girl whose body was found in a Samut Prakan canal on Sunday have conducted DNA tests on 22 migrant workers.

Police and soldiers raided a Bang Saothong shoe factory and workers’ dormitory on Soi Mummai on Tuesday morning, rounding up the 22 workers for testing.
There was no immediate word of a suspect being identified.
The factory, which is in the area where the girl’s body was discovered in Samrong Canal, was targeted after the owner acknowledged ordering rice from a Roi Et mill whose brand name appeared on a sack holding rocks and concrete blocks that had been attached to the victim’s body to submerge it. 
The rice mill went out of business around five years ago and its sacks were resold for other purposes, including to carry construction material.
Police also found traces of a bonfire and the same kind of rope used to bind the girl’s body at an abandoned roadside pavilion near the factory and dormitory.
The girl's fingerprints didn't find any match in a search of the Provincial Administration Department’s database.
Police have asked the Mirror Foundation’s Missing Persons Centre to check its database for anyone matching the victim’s description and the Immigration Police Bureau to see if it has any record of a foreign visitor who might be a match. 
A 45-year-old man identified only as Seubpong asked police on Tuesday morning about the dead girl, concerned she might be his 14-year-old daughter who went missing in Bangkok’s Phra Khanong area on May 6. It turned out she was not.
Initial findings from the Police General Hospital’s Institute of Forensic Medicine indicate the victim was 150 centimetres tall and between 11 and 13 years old. She died as a result of suffocation three days before her body was discovered. 
Police expect that autopsy results due within 10 days will determine if the victim had been raped.

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