THAILAND'S MOMENT OF TRUTH - ZENJOURNALIST

leader, Pride Panymyong, with the assassination of King Ananda Mahidol, and said it
had definite proof that the youthful monarch was murdered…
The military regime, which seized power in a bloodless coup last Sunday, said it had
arrested seven persons, including four women scullery workers in the Royal Palace,
as participants in the slaying of Ananda Mahidol.
Liet. Gen. Phin Chunhawn, Deputy Supreme Commander of the Siamese army, said
that Senior Lieut. Vajarachi Siddhivjev, a secretary to Pride Panymyong, was an
eighth suspect in the assassination, but that he had disappeared.
Those arrested were Chaliew Tradunros, secretary to the late King; palace attendants,
Buth Talmasasarin and Chit Singhasena, and the four women…
“There is definite proof that his late Majesty was murdered,” General Chunhawn
declared…
General Chunhawn said yesterday that several persons had been arrested in a plot
to overthrow the new regime in a counter-revolt. He declared the plotters’ aim was
to prevent the return of the King and to displace the constitutional monarchy with a
republic.
He said members of the wartime Free Thai movement, in which Pride Panymyong
was a leader, were involved in the plot. The plotters, General Chunhawn added,
sought to use arms delivered to Siam by the Allies during the war. These weapons
have remained hidden, he said. [Associated Press, Ananda Murdered, Siamese
Declare, November 16, 1947]
The regime put Seni Pramoj’s brother-in-law Pinit Chongkadi, a police major-general, in
charge of gathering evidence on Pridi’s alleged communist conspiracy to kill King Ananda.
He travelled to London in May 1948 to enlist the help of eminent pathologist Keith Simpson,
professor of forensic medicine in the University of London at Guy's Hospital and lecturer in
forensic medicine at the University of Oxford. From looking at the evidence, Simpson’s view
was that Ananda had clearly been shot dead by somebody – he had neither committed suicide
nor shot himself in the head by accident:
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On 13th May 1948, the Major-General came with an interpreter to see me in London.
The question was still the same: accident, suicide, or murder?
The King had been keenly interested in small firearms, and had often practiced
shooting with Vacharachai. He had kept an American Army .45 Colt automatic in
his bedside drawer. Could it have gone off accidentally while he was examining it?
Would an intelligent man who knew anything about firearms inspect a pistol with the
safety catch off and the magazine fully charged while lying in bed on his back, his
head on the pillow and the pistol pointing at his forehead? The idea seemed wildly
far-fetched, even apart from the fact that the King’s sight was so defective that he
could not have examined anything without his spectacles, and at the time of his death
these were lying on the bedroom table.
The position of the body made suicide almost equally unlikely. In twenty years’
experience I had not seen a suicide shoot himself whilst lying flat on his back. No
such case existed, so far as I knew. The suicide sits up or stands up to shoot himself.
There were other strong indications against suicide. The pistol found at the King’s
side was by his left hand, but he was right-handed. The wound, over the left eye, was
not in one of the elective sites, nor a `contact’ discharge. The direction of fire was