A previous Thai police chief who was jailed for life three years ago for torturing a medicine presume to death has been found dead in his Bangkok prison cell, officials said.
Thitisan Utthanaphon, who was nicknamed Joe Ferrari for his many leisure vehicles, died by suicide, according to a preliminary examination.
In 2021, a leaked videos showed Thitisan and his associates wrapping plastic carriers around the nose of a 24-year-old medicine suspect during an investigation, leading to the criminal’s death.
The film sparked nationwide outrage at that time over police cruelty in Thailand. It has made new rounds on social media in the midst of Thitisant’s suicide.
Thailand’s justice government called for an exploration into his dying after his family expressed concerns that he killed himself. Additional tests will get done to ensure that he had certainly died in a murder.
The community said Thitisant was recently assaulted by a prison employee. They said authorities did not allow them to see his figure, which was found in his body on Friday.
But on Sunday authorities said” no prison officer or inmate has harmed or caused ]his ] death”.
A previous assault on Thitisant’s apartment revealed that he owned a hundred comfort sportscars. Authorities believe he owned at least 42, one of them a rare Lamborghini Aventador Anniversario, of which only 100 were made, priced in Thailand at 47 million baht ($ 1.45m, £1.05m ).
As a police captain, Thitisant was paid about$ 1, 000 a fortnight.
There were complaints that he demanded money from the believe in the popular videos, Jirapong Thanapat, while suffocating him. Thitisant denied this.
Besides Thitisant, five additional officers officials were convicted of murdering Jirapong and were also sentenced to life in prison in 2022.
The Department of Corrections said they had been investigating a past complaint filed by Thitisant’s home alleging that he had been bullied and assaulted by jail officials earlier this year.
Thitisant had consulted doctors over stress issues and problems sleeping, the office said.
His household visited him on the day that he died and jail workers did not notice any “abnormalities”, it said.
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