BANGKOK (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 24th July, 2020) The mummified corpse of a Chinese immigrant executed in Thailand six decades ago on charges of killing and eating children was given a proper funeral on Thursday.
Si Ouey was 32 when he was executed by a firing squad in 1959, after admitting to murdering seven kids, but he denied boiling and eating their internal organs.
He was allegedly caught red-handed in 1958 when the father of a boy who went missing on an errand to buy groceries from Si, a gardener, found the Chinese man burning his remains.
The boy's disemboweled body led to accusations of cannibalism against the impoverished migrant, who was blamed for and reportedly admitted his role in six other child murders.
The case of Thailand's first serial killer was widely covered by the media, turning him into a bogeyman, with parents warning naughty kids to behave or else they will be snatched by Si Ouey.
The man's corpse was embalmed after his execution at Bang Kwang Prison near Bangkok and put on display at nearby Siriraj Forensic Museum as a warning to criminals.
But inconsistencies in Si's alleged testimony have stirred doubts about his guilt in the past decade. Villagers who knew him described Si as a good man who was kind to children. He also spoke no Thai.
Si's arrest and execution happened at the time of aggressive anti-Chinese propaganda in the 1950s when the Communist takeover in Beijing and Bangkok's reliance on the United States made Thailand's ethnic Chinese residents into scapegoats for unsolved crimes.
A campaign to give the man a dignified burial led the authorities to announce last year that his body would be cremated. The dried-out corpse was removed from museum's display in August.
On Thursday, the body was put into a casket and had Buddhist rites performed over it by monks at the Wat Bang Phraek Tai shrine, in a ceremony aired by One31 television channel.
The casket was then taken to a crematorium and lit on fire by the chief of Thailand's Corrections Department. A final resting place for the ashes will be determined later since no relatives came forward to claim them.
