Thai police believe that the Chinese student, who was kidnapped and murdered in Nonthaburi province last week, knew one of her three abductors.
According to investigators, one of the suspects had been courting the student, 22-year-old Jin Can, via social media while she studied music at Bangkok Thonburi University, after they found out that her father is a wealthy teacher in China.
After the first two years of studying online, she flew to Thailand for her third-year of study on March 8th. When the suspects discovered that she had arrived in Bangkok, they flew from Beijing to Bangkok in March, possibly as part of a plot to kidnap her for a ransom.
On March 28th, the suspect who had been courting Jin Can asked her to meet him at Central Westgate shopping mall in Bangkok’s Bang Yai area. According to police, Jin Can took a taxi from her university to the mall, where she alighted and crossed the road to where one of the suspects were waiting in a rented red Mazda.
It was then that she was abducted and taken to a house, where she is believed to have been killed. Before her death, one of the suspects used the VSAT application on her smart phone to call her father back in China to demand 500,000 yuan (~2.5 million baht) in ransom.
They also sent an image of the student with her hands and legs tied with ropes to her father, but he refused to pay the ransom as he reportedly thought that it might be a prank.
Jin Can’s father did, however, contact the her advisory lecturer about the call from a stranger reporting his daughter’s abduction and demanding 2.5 million baht. The lecturer reported this to Bang Yai police on March 30th, which was the same day that the three Chinese suspects departed Thailand for China.
The victim’s body was found in a ditch in a banana plantation in Bang Yai by a villager, who alerted the police.
Police managed to track down the taxi driver who drove the student from her university to the shopping mall and the red Mazda, which was rented from a car rental service on New Phetchaburi Road.
Police have now impounded the car, have identified the Chinese suspects and are coordinating with Chinese police in the search for the suspects.
