Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways (23 page)

Experiments with a typical high explosive in a thin metal container had produced very similar craters to those found in the Convair’s wing roots and particles very like those recovered from the bodies. Clancy was unable to identify the explosive exactly, but he believed it was one with a high velocity of detonation, a military explosive, perhaps, or one used commercially for blasting. C-3 or C-4 high explosives, packing twenty times the power of TNT, could have done the trick; both looked like chewing gum and could be squeezed into any shape at all.

Meticulous examination of the wreckage coupled with Clancy’s findings led Eric Newton, the British Civil Aviation Department’s Chief Inspector of Accidents, to the following reconstruction of events. As Cathay’s flight CX700 sped serenely from Thailand into South Vietnam, a bomb had exploded between rows nine and ten on the Convair’s right side, blowing out a largish section of the right cabin wall over the wing, indicating that at least two kilograms had been used. At least one passenger and a seat or two had been sucked out of this big hole and whipped backwards to strike the
right-hand
stabilizer so violently that it broke off. At the same time escaping fuel from the punctured right-hand tank ignited and flames streamed back along the right-hand side of the fuselage. Without its right-hand stabilizer, the aircraft had pitched suddenly upwards with great force, yawed to the right and turned on its back. The explosion having severed the flying controls beneath the cabin floor, the crew had no hope of controlling these erratic, high-speed manoeuvres. In the sickening vertical plunge tail-first that followed, the aft fuselage began to separate from the wing; the rudder and all four engines separated (only No. 3 engine was recovered); the landing-gear
went at about 10,000 feet; and the front section snapped off, too.

Eric Newton was quite sure that there had been an explosion between seat rows 9 and 10 on the right side; that meant on or under seats 10E or 10F. A check of Cathay’s records showed that these two seats had been occupied – by a Miss Somwang Prompim and a Miss Somthaya Chaiyasuta, both of whom had boarded at Bangkok. Cathay’s District Sales Manager in the Bangkok office, Mr Allan Chao, found that the two passengers had been booked to travel to Hong Kong by twenty-nine-year-old Police Lieutenant Somchai Chaiyasuta of the Police Aviation Division, stationed at Bangkok Airport. Chao further reported to his boss, Jock Campbell, Cathay’s Manager for Thailand, that after the crash of CX700, officials of New Zealand Insurance and American International Assurance had telephoned him with some very interesting information: the former had sold a travel accident policy for 1 million baht (then about US$50,000) to a Miss S. Prompim, and the latter had sold two policies, one to Miss Prompim for 2 million baht and one to Miss Chaiyasuta for 100,000 baht. The beneficiary in each case was Lieutenant Somchai. Mr Chao went on:

When this news reached Duncan Bluck in Hong Kong he wrote to Swires in London: ‘For your information there is one major suspect who is a lieutenant in the Thai police and who is at present in Saigon with some of the other next-of-kin. He is alleged to have insured his common law wife and daughter for a large sum. It is known that they had no hold baggage, and only one suitcase which was placed under the seat specifically requested by him for his common law wife.’

Cathay Pacific now urgently called on their Chief Security Officer to begin a little snooping on his own in Bangkok. Geoffrey Binstead was a Far Eastern hand and a security operative of great experience whose long and adventurous career had started with the British Colonial Police in Palestine in the days before the British Mandate there came to its violent end in 1948. Much more recently he had formed his own security company in Hong Kong, a major undertaking with a staff of several hundred. Burly, handsome and tall, with wavy hair and blue eyes, Binstead was a ‘character’, indefatigable and fearless. He was also a jolly extrovert with a policeman’s shrewdness born of decades of close-range contemplation of sinful humanity. There were, people said admiringly, no flies at all on Geoffrey Binstead.

He now embarked on what he was later to describe as ‘a very weary and trying period’. He instantly made it his top priority to establish an excellent and amicable rapport with the Royal Thai Police officers who were investigating the case. And he was careful to keep the British Embassy informed of his progress, although the Ambassador, Sir Arthur de la Mare, made it very clear to him that ‘if things went sour I collected the acid.’

Binstead picked up a titbit or two on a flying visit to Saigon. Mark Henniker-Major, Cathay’s Assistant Sales Manager, and Patrick Tsai, the Deputy Sales Manager, were both there from Hong Kong and had been coping against odds with the stridently emotional next-of-kin of the crash victims. The large contingent of agitated Japanese was particularly vociferous and many of them were not – as they should have been – relatives of the deceased, but colleagues or even mere acquaintances. Seventeen Japanese crash victims lay in the mortuary, but something like 150
self-styled
‘next-of-kin’ aggressively milled about in the sticky heat of wartime Saigon, badgering Tsai and Henniker-Major with impossible demands.
Among other things they tried to insist that Tsai fly them at once and en masse to the crash site, ignoring his protestations that not being a five-star American general he was in no position to organize such a major expedition to a battle-zone or to guarantee anyone’s safety once there. Eventually as a compromise, an American Army helicopter flew down from the site with a load of stones, branches and bits of debris which were handed out in Saigon as consoling mementoes for the bereaved.

The Thai next-of-kin, of course, included Lieutenant Somchai. Mark Henniker-Major recalled that Somchai had made himself memorable by claiming to be a police lieutenant-colonel and ‘by always asking the same question – what had caused the crash? No other relative of the dead persons in Saigon to identify the bodies asked about the cause of the crash. And at that time we didn’t know it.’

Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, Cathay had arranged for the names of the dead passengers and crew to be printed on the back of the order of service at the memorial service held at St John’s Cathedral for everyone who had perished – the seven Kennys, the Fernandez family of eight, the Thais, Japanese and Hong Kong Chinese, Father Patrick Cunningham, the flying and cabin crews. John Swire was there to read the Lesson and even as John Browne walked slowly to the lectern to deliver the Address, in Bangkok Geoffrey Binstead was beginning, with his customary gusto, to cast around for a scent.

It was also noticed that Somwang Prompim had considerable difficulty in completing the embarkation card. She did not speak English and appeared to have little education, something which hardly matched Somchai’s claim that ‘his wife’ came from a well-to-do family from the north of Thailand and that she had been a mortgage broker for two or three years in Bangkok. In fact, police investigations showed that Somwang’s parents were poor farmers and that they had last seen her seven years before when she had been setting off to find work in a restaurant in Bangkok. They had not heard of any marriage; they had never even heard of Somchai.

Perusing copies of the insurance policies acquired by the Thai police, Binstead wondered why, if Somwang Prompim was Somchai’s wife, as he claimed on the policies, they did not have the same name. He was told that Lieutenant Somchai had explained that Somwang was his ‘minor’ or common law wife of two years. As for the seven-year-old girl, Somthaya, she was not the daughter of Somwang but of Somchai’s first wife, a Filipina named Alice Villiagus. She had been at Adamson University in the Philippines when she met Somchai, at that time an engineering student there. The couple had divorced after a few years (Somchai’s parents did not take to Alice) and Alice agreed to Somchai’s request that their daughter should go to live with his parents in Thailand. Alice told Binstead she was most surprised to hear that Somchai had married Somwang. She also confirmed what the police already knew – that Somchai was something of a man-about-town, a familiar face in the better type of Bangkok night club. This last fact caught Binstead’s attention because he had recently learned that Somwang Prompim, too, had been no stranger to late-night Bangkok.

Accordingly, Geoffrey Binstead bent his steps towards the bright lights. 

Binstead dutifully reported this to his Thai police contact Colonel Term Snidvongse of the Crime Suppression Division, and to his assistant Major Charuk. Then he set off on another prowl. By what now seems to have been an amazing stroke of luck, at a place called the Café de Paris in Patpong Road, the most
mouvementé
of the Thai capital’s raunchier thoroughfares, he struck gold.

I don’t think the Café de Paris exists today. The Memphis Queen, Lucky Strike Disco, McCoy’s (The Real Taste) on the corner of Silom Road, Fine Cat, Spot On, Pussy Galore or King’s Castle (Go Go Girls. Hot Stuff Lovers) – any one of them and twenty others might once have been the Café de Paris. At any rate, it was there that Geoffrey Binstead found a hostess called Katharine who at once, when he confided that he was dealing with next-of-kin in the Cathay Pacific crash, cried, ‘Oh, you should meet Sathinee!’ Sathinee, said Katharine, had been offered money by a Thai policeman to take his child to Hong Kong.

‘
Had been asked to take his child to Hong Kong
?’ Binstead could hardly believe it.

‘Yes. That’s right.’

Sathinee was busy for the night, it seemed, but Binstead wasted no time. Very soon Katharine found herself round the corner at the Narai Hotel in Silom Road, where Binstead was staying, and deep in conversation with Colonel Term and Major Charuk. Next evening she returned to the Café de Paris with Binstead to search for Sathinee. They found her and so Sathinee, too, joined Binstead, Colonel Term and Major Charuk at the Narai Hotel, quickly confirming her story of the policeman’s offer. She was later to repeat the story in the Criminal Court, where – sheltering coyly behind dark glasses – she prettily described how Somchai had promised her 30,000 baht (US$1,700) if she would accompany his seven-year-old daughter on a shopping spree in Hong Kong. He wanted her to act as though she was married to him so that he could dodge a marriage his mother, then in Hong Kong, had arranged for him. It would be strictly a ‘marriage of convenience’, he assured her: she could ‘divorce’ him the minute the mission had been completed. He explained that this simple trick would net him a cool million baht in inheritance money. How about it? Sathinee thought of the money. Well, why not? But a little later she thought better of it.

‘Why?’ asked Binstead.

‘Well, when we left the café he wouldn’t pay his taxi driver. He shouted that he was “Number One police” and that he did not have to pay. So, well, I thought, if he was
that
stingy….’

To test him she asked him to give her an advance on the deal of 5,000 baht, and when he refused she said flatly that it was no dice. Later, she said, when she read about the crash and the deaths of Somwang and Somthaya on their way to Hong Kong, apparently in circumstances strikingly similar to those suggested to her by Somchai, she sat up thinking, ‘There, but for the Grace of God….’ She was scared. Particularly when very soon a man she knew to be one of Somchai’s friends came sidling up to her in the Café de Paris one night and snarled in her ear, ‘Don’t say anything. Just keep quiet. See?’ She did see, and when she told Binstead’s police friends about it, Colonel Term spirited her away to another room at the Narai Hotel, and later on to the grander Dusit Thani. From then on the police provided her with pocket money and protection as befitted a key witness.

On 31 August 1972 Somchai was arrested, stripped of his police rank and charged with premeditated mass murder and sabotage.

*

The trial of Somchai Chaiyasuta began on 11 May 1973 and lasted for over a year. At his first appearance, before the Criminal Court panel of three judges and without benefit of jury, Somchai pleaded not guilty. ‘The
neatly-dressed
defendant,’ an English-language Bangkok newspaper said, ‘who stands accused of a crime which could make him one of the worst mass murderers in history, looked nervous and ill-tempered. But he appeared to get a grip on himself after getting his shoulder patted by defence counsel.’ Somchai’s own father, a successful Bangkok lawyer, led the defence.

Everyone
needed to get a grip on themselves, for the trial generated great and universal emotion. For a time some observers, particularly (but not only) from outside Thailand, had been inclined to think that the Thai Government would find it impossible to accept the bomb theory – it was a matter of ‘face’. The government of that time ruled as a virtual dictatorship (it was to be overthrown in 1976 as a result of violent student riots) and its leaders took umbrage at rumours that a Thai – and a Thai policeman, at that – could have done such a terrible thing. Furthermore, the idea that a bomb could be smuggled on board an international flight from Bangkok’s airport seemed an outrageous slur on what Thai ministers, especially the powerful Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister, General Prapas Charusthien, claimed to regard as impregnable security arrangements. It appeared to him to be a dastardly attempt by unscrupulous foreign aviation interests to destroy the international status of Thailand’s major airport. Equally, for the Thai man-in-the-street – who is undoubtedly one of the world’s proudest human beings – it went wholly against the grain to believe that a Thai father
would deliberately destroy his own daughter, for whatever reason. No Thai would ever do such a thing! These attitudes changed as the trial progressed, worn down by the weight of expert evidence from the likes of Eric Newton and Vernon Clancy as well as the evidence against Somchai gathered by the Thai police investigators. Geoffrey Binstead thought very highly of these officers’ ability and appreciated their determination to preserve the good name of the Royal Police Force by insisting that everything be brought into the open.

As the trial progressed it was alleged that Somchai had hidden his bomb in a cosmetics case he had given to Somwang which she carried aboard the Convair 880. A Thai official from the Embassy in Saigon told the court that when the bodies were being identified by next-of-kin, Somchai kept telling him, ‘I don’t care about the bodies, but I would like to have the case.’ Police had discovered in Somchai’s house four cosmetics boxes similar, if not identical, to the one Somwang had been seen carrying onto the plane; strange holes had been drilled in two of them. Somchai later told the court that these holes were to accommodate a wire (perhaps an aerial) and an earphone for a walkie-talkie. He intended to carry the walkie-talkie in one of the boxes, he said. Or perhaps he might fit a camera into it. When the prosecutor asked him what kind of pictures he liked to take with the camera, Somchai said he had not yet decided.