On April 20, Pranee Suanpetch was supposed to board her flight back to Canada to continue her studies. Unfortunately, she had a different plan, one that included an unannounced gambling trip to a casino in Poipet, Cambodia, and led to her clueless family filing a missing persons report on Saturday.
The 20-year-old Thai student confessed the entire story to reporters yesterday, after Thai and Cambodian police “rescued” her from a Poipet casino on Monday, where she was allegedly barred from leaving unless she paid off the gambling debt she had run up (a weirdly common occurrence in the rough border town, believe it or not).
It all began when her elder sister Athitaya, 30, frantically came to the police on Saturday after discovering her sister had never made it to Canada after they parted at Suvarnabhumi Airport last month.
Athitaya said she had recently lost contact with Pranee, only to then receive a call from an unknown person that her sister was at a Cambodian casino and she had owed someone money.
Athitaya then checked with her relatives in Canada, who confirmed that Pranee hadn’t arrived. In the meantime, she had no way of contacting her sister.
Police carrying out the investigation discovered that Pranee had stamped out off the country at the Thai-Cambodian border on May 10.
Thai police working with Cambodian authorities finally tracked her down, but when the young woman was found on Monday, she insisted that no one had harmed her or abducted her.
“No one detained me. No one lured me to the casino. I went there on my own,” Pranee told reporters yesterday.
“Look at me. I’m just a kid. Who would loan me money?” she said casually.
She said that she had stayed with her friends in Phuket, Bangkok, and Pattaya before going off to Cambodia alone.
Pranee’s uncle Plai Manpuen, however, who is a kamnan (governing subdistrict headman) and worked with the police in tracking her down, told reporters his niece’s story was full of sh*t — in so many words — because he had personally had to pay off the casino in order for them to release her from the establishment, Morning News reported.
Pranee, meanwhile, insists that she simply ran away because she was stressed out, and the reason her family couldn’t contact her was because she had to sell her mobile phone and passport to get more money to stay in Cambodia. (Wait? Someone paid for her passport?)
She said she now plans to go back to Canada to continue her studies and will not run away again. May we suggest having her good uncle accompany her this time to make sure she actually makes it to campus?
