Yesterday the [him] moderator published a brief comment about the apocryphal decade-old 'murdered sex workers story'  http://www.hivinfo4mm.org/bridge-character-article-in-the-la-times/.

This comment from Thiha is printed with his permission.

Jamie

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"This story doesn't make sense to me.  The Ranong police are totally corrupt from the bottom to the top and have little regard for the humanity of Burmese let alone any Rohingya that they might find ship wrecked.  There is a cemetery in Tambon Saidang, Ranong filled with un-named Burmese.   If the girls were killed by the Police that is where they would have wound up. Or if they were re-repatriated why were they not just put on a long tail boat and sent across the Pakchan Estuary to Kawthaung Burma, twenty minutes away.  How did they get eight hundred kilometers north to the Moei River, I guess that that would have been at Mae Sot- Myawadi. Was that the only point of formal re-repatriation?  Where they Karen?  The Thai police, as a private racket on the peninsula smuggle Burmese all the time on back country roads and with pay-offs past the army check points, but this is mostly north to south. It was a long time ago, but I wonder where they were  re-repatriated.  Sometimes when you pull on a thread in a story like this it is amazing what will unravel. At least it is something to think about.  I agree with your cogent observation about a 'bridge character'.  It is a standard journalistic technigue; the hook."

Thiha