On October 5, 2011, on the Mekong River near Chiang Saen in northern Thailand, two Chinese cargo boats were seized and taken downstream.
They were the Hua Ping and the Yu Xing 8. Both had left the Chinese river port of Guanlei bound for Thailand, running a route their crews had worked for years.
By that afternoon the boats had been stopped. The hulls were there. The cargo was there. The men were gone.
One. What came up out of the water
What the Thai authorities first had on their hands was a puzzle with no people in it. A Chinese boat, Chinese cargo, and not one Chinese sailor aboard. The men who should have been on the deck, in the engine room, in the galley, were nowhere.
Over the following days, bodies came up in the river.
Thirteen men were finally accounted for, all of them recovered from the water. They were all Chinese crew members. The oldest was in his forties. The youngest had just turned twenty. They had supported families on this river for years. To them the Mekong was not a line on a map. It was water they crossed every day, black where it ran deep and yellow where it turned shallow, rising in the wet season and falling in the dry, with rocks and currents a skipper knew with his eyes shut.
The place where it happened, the Golden Triangle, is the country where Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet, a region of high forests and thin government. Boats on this stretch paid a fee to whichever armed group held the bank. That was not a secret. Everyone who worked the river knew it.
One boat seized might be robbery. Two boats seized, and thirteen men put into the river and not one of them left alive, is not robbery.
So what was it.
Two. A killer who left no trace
For the first days after the attack, the story on the water was chaos.
The early account given out was that the two boats had been carrying drugs, and that the crew were traffickers. That version ran in the papers for several days, until the families of the dead came down from Yunnan to Thailand and identified the bodies, one by one.
To work out who had done it, you had to start with the river itself.
The Mekong had a number of armed groups of different sizes, taking protection money, running drugs, holding people. None of them answered to anyone. Around the time of the attack the strongest of these groups was the one run by Naw Kham. He was a Myanmar national who had operated in the Golden Triangle for years, with armed men, boats, and bases, and contacts among junior army officers, police and village officials in several countries.
The Chinese police set up a task force on November 1 of that year, with Liu Yuejin, then head of the narcotics bureau of the Ministry of Public Security, in charge. More than two hundred officers were drawn in, fanning out into the countries along the river.
It became clear very early that the difficulty of this case was not the direction. It was the man.
Three. Working up from the bottom
Naw Kham ran his group in layers. At the top was Naw Kham himself. Below him were a handful of lieutenants, each with his own piece of the business.
The task force decided to start at the bottom and work up.
At the end of November, the task force caught a key member of the group on the Mekong along the China-Myanmar border. He described how the organisation was put together and who did what. He also said one thing that fixed the direction of the whole investigation. The attack, he said, had been carried out by Naw Kham. That sentence settled it.
Following the trail downward, the task force focused on the group number three man, Yi Lai. Yi Lai was in charge of every boat the group ran on the Mekong. Nothing moved on the water without passing him. In the middle of December the task force received word that Yi Lai was about to move northwest into Laos. Working with police in the countries concerned, they set an ambush on the road he had to take and stopped him.
What Yi Lai gave them was far more than the first man had. According to his statement, the attack had been carried out jointly by the Naw Kham group and a number of individual Thai soldiers, with the work divided between them. The group had been squeezed by joint Chinese enforcement and wanted to strike back at Chinese shipping. The Thai side wanted the case for credit and reward. The two needs fitted together, and the deal was made.
And so the net closed, one layer at a time, around one man.
Four. Three times they missed him
The task force went after Naw Kham three times and missed him three times.
The first attempt came in early December 2011. A reliable report placed him in a village in Phongsali province in Laos, where one of his wives lived. The task force asked the Lao army and police to search the village. The village head stopped them at the entrance. By the time they reached the house, it was empty. That night, with several villagers walking him out, Naw Kham crossed the river into Myanmar.
The second attempt came in March 2012. He was confirmed to be in a camp in the mountains of Myanmar, and the task force asked the Myanmar side to make the arrest. The team worked its way to the outer edge of the camp and ran into a sentry. In the confusion shots were fired. At the sound of them, Naw Kham was gone again.
The third attempt was on April 10 of that year. Myanmar troops moved in force towards his new base. Once again the approach was spotted.
Three failures made one thing plain. Naw Kham was harder to take inside his own country than outside it. He had built roads for the villages and paid them money, and the villages watched the roads for him and warned him in time.
The task force changed tack. Take the limbs first, and let the body fall.
In April 2012 the number two man, Sang Kang, was arrested on the Myanmar-Thailand border. One by one the senior men were picked off. Naw Kham could no longer hold his ground on the Myanmar side, and began moving towards Laos.
In the late afternoon of April 25, on the Lao bank of the Mekong in Phongsali province, a small speedboat crossed over from the Myanmar side and came in to land. Three men stepped ashore and started towards the trees.
Laos police were waiting on the bank.
The three men ran, drawing weapons and firing as they went. Police closed in from every direction and put them on the ground. The shorter, deeply tanned, middle-aged man among them was Naw Kham.
When the news reached the command post, Liu Yuejin let out a long breath. He had been holding it for more than half a year.
Five. More than one country wanted him
Naw Kham had been caught in Laos, but China was not the only country asking for him.
Thailand wanted him. The attack had happened in Thai waters, and the Thai side had been investigating since the day it occurred. Myanmar wanted him too, because he was a Myanmar national. The man was in Lao custody, and three governments were negotiating.
Liu Yuejin flew to Laos and went from door to door. His argument was this. Both boats flew the Chinese flag. Under the general rules of international law, a ship is an extension of the territory of the country whose flag it flies, and a crime committed aboard it falls within the jurisdiction of that country. The boats were Chinese. The men were Chinese.
On May 3 and May 10, 2012, the Lao leadership met twice on the question. In the end the Lao government agreed to hand Naw Kham over to the Chinese police.
On the morning of May 10, at Vientiane airport, Lao police formally transferred Naw Kham to the Chinese police. He was put aboard a chartered aircraft and flown home. It was the first time the Chinese police had used international police cooperation to bring back alive, for trial, the head of an organisation that had committed a major crime abroad.
Within a fortnight of his removal, more than thirty members of his group surrendered to the Lao military. The number four man, Weng Mie, surrendered to Myanmar with fifty or sixty followers, and in August he too was transferred to China to assist the investigation.
Six. In court
On November 6, 2012, the Intermediate People’s Court of Kunming, in Yunnan province, delivered its first instance judgment in open court.
The court found that Naw Kham, Sang Kang and Yi Lai had committed intentional homicide, drug trafficking, kidnapping and seizure of a vessel, and sentenced them to death on the combined counts. Zha Xika was sentenced to death on the combined counts of intentional homicide, kidnapping and seizure of a vessel. Zha Bo received a death sentence with a two-year reprieve. Zha Tuobo received eight years. The six defendants were ordered to pay six million yuan jointly to the plaintiffs in the attached civil claims.
All six appealed immediately.
On December 26 of the same year, the Higher People’s Court of Yunnan heard the appeal and upheld the original judgment, sending the four death sentences to the Supreme People’s Court for review.
During that review, a judge went to serve the result on Naw Kham. Those present said he took it calmly, saying only that he had paid compensation and admitted his guilt, and asking the Chinese government to be lenient with him. The judge explained that this was a final ruling, already in force.
The court also followed the procedures for foreign nationals, notifying the Thai and Myanmar consulates in Kunming so they could meet the defendants, and contacting relatives through the consulates to arrange visits.
On the afternoon of March 1, 2013, acting on an execution order signed by the President of the Supreme People’s Court, the Kunming court executed Naw Kham, Sang Kang, Yi Lai and Zha Xika by lethal injection, with the Kunming municipal procuratorate present to observe.
A few days later the six million yuan was paid out in full to the families of the thirteen sailors, in the proportions set by the judgment.
Seven. Two things an outside reader should know
The first is how the man was brought home.
He was not taken in a raid, and no foreign officer went in to seize him. He was arrested by the police of a third country and handed over at an airport, after his own government had weighed the request and said yes. That route matters. Some countries have gone another way, sending teams into foreign cities to grab a suspect and put him on a plane, a practice usually called rendition, and it has caused diplomatic storms. China chose the slower door. The reasons were partly legal and partly practical. The two boats flew the Chinese flag, and under the flag state principle a ship is treated as an extension of the territory of the country whose flag it carries, which gave China a jurisdictional claim it could argue rather than assert. The claim was contested. Thailand and Myanmar both wanted the man as well. That it was settled by argument, in a matter of weeks, is the unusual part.
The second is what happens after a death sentence in China, because it is the part that most surprises readers of Chinese true crime.
China is a civil law system. There is no jury. A death sentence passed by a lower court does not take effect on its own. Every death sentence must go up to the Supreme People’s Court in Beijing for review, and only if that court approves it can the president of that court sign the order to carry it out. The review has no fixed time limit. In this case the judgment came in November, the appeal was decided in December, and the executions were carried out the following March. That gap between sentence and death, which reads at first like delay, is in fact the system working as designed. In the record of the Chinese criminal case, few cases show the machinery so plainly.
Eight. The river goes on
The year after the case closed, China, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand began joint patrols on the Mekong. The patrol boats leave Guanlei and run downstream, stopping and starting, one boat after another.
The machinery had in fact started moving much earlier. Before the year was out, the four countries had set up a joint enforcement and security cooperation framework for the Mekong basin, and in December the first joint patrol left Guanlei. For the men who work this river, that is what it means. How much smaller the odds became that the next boat would be stopped the way those two were.
The names of the thirteen sailors are not painted on the patrol boats. The river they worked for so many years now carries other boats up and down.
At midday on October 5, 2011, on the water near Chiang Saen, two Chinese cargo boats were taken downstream under guard, strangers on the deck and speedboats behind. People on the bank saw it happen. None of them knew that the men who belonged on those decks were already gone.
The case began in the water. The last stretch of the road for those thirteen men was in the water too.
