By Thai Newsroom Reporters
JAKRAPOB PENKAIR, former minister attached to the Prime Minister’s Office, is coming back tomorrow (Mar. 28) after 15 years in self-exile abroad.
The outspoken Jakrapob posted on his Facebook page today to say he is returning home tomorrow but it remains to be seen whether he will be immediately arrested on charge of breaking the draconian lese majeste law, also known as Section 112 of the Criminal Code, among other possible lawsuits.
Nevertheless, Jakrapob could probably rest assured of being saved from being literally put behind bars upon his homecoming tomorrow, given last year’s precedent in which de facto Pheu Thai boss-cum-convict on parole Thaksin Shinawatra had managed to practically keep himself from jail, according to a partisan source.
Thaksin who has been also accused of violating the lese majeste law by making contentious verbal statements during an interview with a South Korean news agency in Seoul in 2015 is scheduled for Apr. 10 to hear a court ruling on his case.
Since Jakrapob fled the country in self-exile in 2009 ahead of the height of government troops fatally quelling Red Shirt street protesters in the following year, his whereabouts abroad has remained a mystery. The former Prime Minister’s Office minister was said to have holed up somewhere in Cambodia before he went globetrotting elsewhere.
Jakrapob had been earlier charged with violating the lese majeste law after he had delivered a speech on Thailand’s patronage systems at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand.
The former minister attached to the Prime Minister’s Office was widely known as a founding member of the now-defunct Democratic Alliance Against Dictatorship which became the United Front of Democracy Against Dictatorship, better known as Red Shirt movement, covertly endorsed by the then-fugitive Thaksin.
The 2014 coup junta headed by former army chief-turned-prime minister/now de facto Ruam Thai Sang Chart boss/privy councillor Prayut Chan-o-cha had charged the fugitive Jakrapob of offering on social media to literally arm Red Shirt activists with war weapons in a non-existent revolt against the junta’s regime in 2017.
Jakrapob was government spokesman during the premiership of Thaksin who had founded the Thai Rak Thai and was named minister attached to the Prime Minister’s Office in the time of the late prime minister Samak Sundaravej, attached to the People’s Power Party, a resurrection of the court-dissolved Thak Rak Thai. The People’s Power was also dissolved by court and resurrected as the Pheu Thai.
CAPTION:
Former minister Jakrapob Penkair. Top photo: BBC, Front Page photo: Matichon
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