Panumas Sanguanwong/BBC Thai
Image caption In 1989, Kriangkrai Techamong stole $20m of jewels and gems from his boss, a Saudi prince.
The theft of precious jewels from a Saudi palace in 1989 set off a chain of killings and a diplomatic crisis that continues to this day. Now, in a rare interview, the man behind the theft tells his story.
The Saudi prince and his wife were away on holiday for three months, and the thief knew this was the time to strike.
Kriangkrai Techamong was running a significant risk. Stealing could be punished with amputation in Saudi Arabia, but Kriangkrai's was no ordinary theft - he had his eye on dozens of precious gems and jewels owned by his employer Prince Faisal, the eldest son of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.
As a cleaner, Kriangkrai had come to know every corner of Prince Faisal's palace. And he had learned that three of the four safes containing the prince's jewels were regularly left unlocked. It was too good an opportunity to miss: he was struggling with gambling debt he had built up on the site where the palace workers lived, and this was a golden chance to flee the repressive country where he could no longer bear to live.
One evening, he made up an excuse to be inside the palace after dark. He waited until other staff had left, and sneaked into the prince's bedroom. He picked some jewels and stuck them to his body using duct tape. He also stored gems inside cleaning equipment, including vacuum bags.
By the end, he had taken almost 30kg (66lbs) of loot, valued at close to $20m. Among the pilfered items, Saudi officials would later say, were gold watches and several plump rubies.
That night, Kriangkrai hid the valuables all over the palace, in places he knew they would not be discovered. And then, over a month, he moved them and hid them in the middle of a large cargo delivery he was sending home to Thailand.
Thai police display some of the jewels they recovered, with Kriangkrai in handcuffs on the right
By the time the theft was discovered, Kriangkrai had already fled to his native Thailand, with his cargo leaving a few days before him. But the thief faced another challenge: how to get the stolen goods through Thai customs. All items imported from abroad had to be checked as they entered the country. But because he knew Thai officials could not resist a bribe, Kriangkrai stuffed an envelope with money and a note and put it in his cargo. The note said his cargo had ographic material inside, and he would prefer it not to be searched.
His plan worked, but Kriangkrai could evade justice for only so long. In January 1990, he was arrested at his home in Thailand's northern Lampang province after the Thai police were alerted by their Saudi counterparts.
The gems and jewels - some of which he had kept, some of which he had sold - were retrieved soon afterwards. But some time in between their retrieval and their return to Riyadh, another crime occurred. Saudi officials said about 80% were missing, and many of those that had been returned were fake. Then, photographs started circulating of the wife of one senior Thai official wearing a necklace with an uncanny resemblance to one of the missing items.
It was the disappearance of one piece in particular that caused consternation, however: a rare 50-carat blue diamond the size of an egg.
Only about 1 in 10,000 diamonds has a distinct body colour, and of those, just a tiny minority are blue, ensuring they are among the rarest and most valuable in the world. Their distinct colour comes from the faint traces of boron inside, an element present when the diamond was formed up to 600km (370 miles) below the Earth's surface.
Many of the blue diamonds in circulation today come from one source - the Cullinan mine near Pretoria in South Africa - but the origin story of the Saudi blue diamond is unclear and no known photographs of it exist.
The case might have ended with Kriangkrai jailed for under three years and Saudi Arabia decrying the disappearance of the prince's jewels, and the blue diamond in particular. Instead, the investigation took a bloody turn.
In early February 1990, two officials from the visa section of the Saudi embassy in Bangkok were driving towards the compound in the Thai capital. About a half a mile from their destination, their car was attacked by gunmen and both men were killed. At about the same time, another gunman entered the apartment of one of the men's colleagues and shot him dead.
Weeks afterwards, a Saudi businessman, Mohammad al-Ruwaili, was despatched to Bangkok to investigate what might have happened to the missing hoard. But he too was targeted - he was kidnapped and, while his body has never been found, he is widely believed to have been murdered.
Plenty of theories about the killings exist. According to a diplomatic note written in 2010 by the deputy chief of mission in the US embassy in Bangkok, and later released by Wikileaks, the killings of the three diplomats "almost certainly were part of a Saudi feud with Hezbollah", the Lebanese Shia Muslim militant group.
But one Saudi official in particular was clear about who was responsible.
Mohammed Said Khoja, without his gun, displays evidence from the missing jewels case
Mohammed Said Khoja, a Saudi diplomat of 35 years' experience, was sent to Bangkok soon after the theft to oversee the investigation. After expecting to be in Thailand for only three months, he ended up staying for several years.
His role was technically not that of an ambassador, but of the lesser charge d'affaires. This was because Saudi Arabia had downgraded its relations with Thailand after the theft and murders, a move that saw the number of Thai workers in Saudi Arabia drop from more than 200,000 to only 15,000. This reportedly cost the Thai economy - so dependent on relatives sending money home - billions of dollars a year. Relations between the two countries are barely any better today.
Khoja, a stern moustachioed man, would give press interviews with his Smith & Wesson gun on the desk next to him, insisting that the Thai police were out to get him. His interviews, which would feature on the front pages of Thai newspapers, were unusually candid for a diplomat.
He would openly accuse the Thai police of stealing the recovered haul, and of killing the Saudi diplomats and businessman to cover up their own embezzlement. The men were killed, he said, because they had uncovered sensitive information about the theft. The police officer in charge of the investigation into the diplomats' killings was charged with Mohammad al-Ruwaili's disappearance, but the charges were later dropped.
"The police here are bigger than the government itself," Khoja told the New York Times in September 1994. "I am a Muslim, and I stay because I feel I am fighting the devils."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49824325
