Fugitive crime boss escapes from hideaway on Trang mountain
Police confirmed that a fugitive crime boss from Phatthalung had escaped from his hiding place atop a mountain in Trang on Wednesday after exchangingfire with police.
Before the police’s statement, online publication Khaosod had reported that Chavalit Thongduang, 37, had been killed while resisting arrest.
However, Assistant National Police chief Pol Lt-General Itthipol Atchariyapradit rejected the report saying he was overseeing the hunt for the fugitive and had not heard about the killing.
Some 300 armed police officers from Provincial Police Regions 8 and 9 had been sent up the mountain near a village in Palian district to hunt Chavalit down.
Earlier, a villager had been arrested for allegedly helping the convict and his henchmen find a hiding place. The villager had been about to deliver food to the fugitives when he was caught.
Police said Chavalit was armed with an M16 rifle, an HK-1 rifle, a 9mm pistol and some 600 rounds of ammunition.
The crime boss had managed to escape in the early hours of October 22 when he had faked an illness and had been admitted to Nakhon Si Thammarat Hospital.
Chavalit has been under the watchful eye of the police since 2007 before he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years and three months in prison for trying to help one of his henchmen break out of jail. He would have completed his term on May 6.
Chavalit had been wanted over several cases, but always managed to escape sentencing thanks to help from a big-name politician in Phatthalung.
Among the serious charges, Chavalit was accused of masterminding the abduction and murder of a police officer in Phatthalung’s Muang district in 2007. He was also suspected of masterminding the abduction of small narcotics dealers in the South to extort protection fees. Sources say most of the crimes he is accused of took place in 2019 when he also tried to mastermind the jailbreak of his henchman and get a highway police officer in Phatthalung killed.
Though he claimed he was trying to change his ways, so he could become a local politician, he was arrested early this year.
After six months behind bars, he allegedly engineered an attack on fellow prisoner and arch-rival Chuk Rakjan.
This incident prompted the Corrections Department to move him to the Nakhon Si Thammarat maximum prison on August 7.
