A Thai man has been sentenced to death after a German real estate agent was murdered and found dismembered in a freezer.
Peter Ralter Mack, 62, was murdered by Shakrukh Karim Uddin and two German nationals in southern Thailand last year.
Piriya Boonmark, Mr. Mack’s wife, first raised the alarm about his disappearance on July 4, 2023, after he left their home to see a real estate agent but did not return.
Just six days later he was found massacred, wrapped in a thick layer of duct tape inside a freezer in Chonburi province.
Local police soon found the real estate agent’s Mercedes-Benz E350 completely cleaned with chemicals. Investigators claimed this was an attempt to get rid of any evidence.
A CCTV camera later emerged showing the trio of suspects carrying a freezer to a property just 400 meters from where the vehicle had been discovered.
During the trial at Pattaya Provincial Court it was revealed that Mr Mack had been kidnapped and had 3.35 million baht (£78,000) drained from his bank account before being murdered by the three.
Peter Ralter Mack, 62, was murdered by Shakrukh Karim Uddin and two German nationals in southern Thailand last year.
Shahrukh Karim Uddin was arrested on Wednesday after trying to escape to Maynmar.
There were claims that alleged ringleader Olaf Thorsten Brinkmann, Petra Christl Grundgreif and Uddin, a member of the Oulaws motorcycle club, were planning to dump the man’s body into the sea.
The Thai court found all three guilty of premeditated murder and concealing a corpse, but the two German nationals were sentenced to life imprisonment instead of capital punishment because of their confessions.
Shakrukh Karim Uddin has since been sentenced to death.
Under Thailand’s strict legal system, capital punishment remains legal, despite attempts to repeal it. The death penalty can be imposed for a long list of crimes, including murder, treason, terrorism, extreme cases of rape and robbery, and drug trafficking.
Although the country has studied other methods of execution, such as lethal injection, today executions are carried out by pistol shooting.
Condemned prisoners are sedated, placed face down on a mattress, and shot three times in the heart. If the prisoner has chosen to donate his internal organs, then he is executed with a single bullet to the back of the head.
As of August, there were almost 400 prisoners sentenced to death in the country and the last execution took place in June 2018.
In the incident, a 26-year-old man died by lethal injection accused of robbery and murder of a 17-year-old boy.