The barbarity of the killings, a series of missteps in the Thai investigation and a clumsily-staged police re-enactment of the murders involving the two Burmese men made headlines for several weeks.
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Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha agreed previous year to allow Britain’s Metropolitan police to conduct an inquiry in an attempt to reassure the victims’ families that the judicial process was being carried out in a fair and transparent way.
But that move also became embroiled in controversy as British lawyers representing the men sued in the High Court for the release of the report.
Defence lawyers called upon Thailand’s Central Institute of Forensic Science, headed by Dr Pornthip Rojanasunand, to reexamine crucial DNA evidence last month.
Prior to their arrest, concerns were raised police would seek to blame the crime on migrant workers after investigators said as much at the outset. They believed their sons had been tortured into confessing to the murder of the British tourists. They then veered from assigning blame to a British friend of the deceased, Rohingya migrants and influential figures on the island before announcing Zaw Lin and Wai Phyo had confessed.
“Police told me that as I had no passport, I had no rights”, he said, adding that his interrogators said Burmese migrants had been killed before for not cooperating.
The former said they were threatened with a lethal injection by prison guards if they did.
In earlier testimony Zaw Lin had told the court he thought the police officers were going to suffocate him as they repeatedly put plastic bags over his head and tightened them around his face and neck until he collapsed.
He also said he was told his body would be dismembered, burned and dumped at sea.
After Thai police claimed there was no DNA evidence on the wooden handle of the alleged murder weapon, a garden hoe, CIFS retested it and found the victims’ DNA and another incomplete male DNA profile which could not be proven to come from either defendant.
The two Burmese men have acknowledged that they were on the beach the night that the two Britons were beaten to death as they walked back from a bar to their hotel.
The court also asked Wei Phyo about a mobile telephone found close to his lodgings.
Mr Nakhon said the judge gave him and the prosecutor until October 26 to deliver their closing statements before giving his verdict on December 24.
It confirmed that the security settings of the retrieved phone were those of Mr Miller’s device. Wei Phyo admitted he had found the telephone on the same beach where Mr Miller was killed and took it home but couldn’t unlock it.
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“The next day we heard about the murders and we were anxious it might belong to someone involved”, he told the court.
