Baggage handlers to strike at Easter

 Baggage handlers at Stansted Airport are to strike over Easter in a row over pay, the GMB union announced today. The move follows an overwhelming vote in favour of industrial action by 150 GMB members employed by Swissport after the union claimed that shift changes would lead to wage cuts of up to £1,000. The GMB said strikes will be held on Good Friday, Easter Saturday and Easter Monday, threatening disruption to passengers flying on holiday for the holiday break. GMB official Gary Pearce said: "GMB members have voted overwhelmingly for strike action and for action short of a strike. "Up to now the company has been intent on imposing these changes without agreement and this is completely unacceptable, as this vote shows. "GMB has offered several alternative shift patterns and working...

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14-year-old girl who was kidnapped and sent to Thailand is traumatised and unable to speak to the police.

Shah Alam OCPD Asst Comm Zahedi Ayob said the girl was in hospital and responding well to treatment. "However, she cannot remember much. She only told us that she was abducted in a white van from Section 9," he told reporters at the district police headquarters here yesterday. The teen was found with five other girls from Myanmar at the Hua Lampong train station in Bangkok on March 11 and arrived back home on Monday. "We hope the Thai authorities will send the Myanmar citizens here so that we can probe further. We are investigating if these teenagers were also kidnapped the same day that the girl was abducted," ACP Zahedi said. He refused to confirm if the teen was kidnapped by a child sex trafficking syndicate, but said the case was being investigated under Section 366 of the Penal Code...

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Pattaya Police is hunting a barbaric gang that alledgedly cut off Cambodian children’s tongues and removed their larynxes before forcing them to beg in Pattaya.

A Pattaya Daily News journalist was informed by social & welfare officers who had detained a seven-year-old mutilated Combodian boy (he could not tell his name ), the boy was mutilated, his tongue was cut off and had scars of primitive surgery on his neck. It looked like his larynx had been removed. This boy was arrested while he was roaming around in Pattaya begging for money. The officers brought the boy to the childrens welfare center last year. The boy was always tense and paranoid, he could not speak. The officers from the national center for prevention and suppression of human trafficking came to question him. They told the child to point at the answers written on the paper: “Yes” and “No” in Cambodian. It was a tragic story. He had been a normal young boy in Cambodia. But when...

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Missing M’sian girl took lift into Thailand from stranger

 Thai immigration police investigations have indicated that a 14-year-old Malaysian girl and her five Rohingya friends had taken a lift from a stranger in Malaysia near the Malaysia-Thai border before entering Thailand illegally. The six have since been rescued by the Thai police. Deputy Commander of Immigration Bureau Investigation Centre Pol Col Chartchai Lamsaeng said Wednesday, the six took the ride on a Malaysian-registered van offered by a Malaysian man near the border on March 8. The five Rohingyas comprised four boys and a girl, aged between 14 and 16. The six were friends and know each other. "They were given drinks by the man and fell asleep shortly," Chartchai, who led the investigation into the case, told Bernama here. He said, they could only remember passing through...

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British man, wife killed at Thai resort

 POLICE say a British man and his Thai wife have been robbed and beaten to death at a seaside resort south of Bangkok. Police Major General Wichean Tantawiriya says three Thai men - a security guard and chef at the resort and their friend - were arrested today and had confessed to killing the couple and taking a mobile phone and 5000 baht ($155). Wichean says the bodies of Michael Raymond, 68, and Suchada Bowkamdee, 52, were discovered yesterday in their bungalow at the Jack Beach Resort in Prachuap Khiri Khan province, 350km south of Bangkok. He says they had checked in a day earlier. Wichean says two of the three suspects were addicted to methamphetamine, a stimulant, and needed money to buy dru...

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Mexico Arrests Boss of La Mano con Ojos Gang

 Mexican authorities have arrested the La Mano con Ojos (The Hand with Eyes) drug gang’s reputed leader, who confessed to ordering the murders of 10 people. The arrest of Marco Antonio Hernandez Garcia was made near the Villa Olimpica neighborhood of southern Mexico City, the capital’s district attorney, Jesus Rodriguez, told reporters. Hernandez Garcia, alias “El Comandante,” who was detained Thursday along with bodyguard Gustavo Moreno Diaz, confessed to ordering the killings of 10 people “whose bodies were mutilated – some incinerated – and abandoned in different parts of the capital,” Rodriguez said. The victims, all decapitated and found with threatening messages alongside them, were suspected rivals involved in the local drug trade, the DA said. The suspect told authorities...

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Free at last: Longest-serving farang at 'Bangkok Hilton' is checking out

 Like most prisons, Bang Kwang Central reeks of decay. But the fetidness of the "Bangkok Hilton", as it is known by inmates, is more indicative of the soul of the place than the damp edifices that contain the men. Built in the 1930s to hold 3500, the maximum security prison in Thailand's biggest city now houses about 8000 inmates, who have been sentenced to more than 25 years each, as well as hundreds awaiting the outcome of their pending appeals, or execution. Leg irons provide a means of status identification: new inmates wear theirs for the first three months, whereas those on death row have their shackles permanently welded on. Fates are determined by will or whim -- a royal birthday here, a public holiday there. The stroke of a monarch's pen determines who shall live, die or be...

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INDONESIAN authorities claim an Australian man arrested this week allegedly carrying 1.1kg of hashish inside his body was couriering for an international drug network.

 INDONESIAN authorities claim an Australian man arrested this week allegedly carrying 1.1kg of hashish inside his body was couriering for an international drug network. Because the amount exceeds 1kg, Edward Norman Myatt, 54, could face the death penalty if convicted of importing the drug, said I Made Wijaya, chief of Customs at Bali's Ngurah Rai international airport. "We believe he is a courier," Mr Wijaya yesterday told a press conference at which the Ballarat-born suspect was exhibited along with the drugs. "He is covering up information on the network in Indonesia." Speaking later in Denpasar, Gories Mere, chief of the national counter-narcotics agency BNN, said international drug syndicates were supplying illegal drugs into Bali. The trade had been in methamphetamines, Mr Gories...

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