Thailand has released one of its best known drug traffickers. Laota Saenli, 86, walked out of Bang Kwang Central Prison on Friday under a royal pardon.
He was freed under the royal pardon decree of 2026, issued to mark the celebration of Queen Suthida’s 48th birthday on 3 June.
Before any of that, Laota held local office. Thai media reported he had once been a village headman in Huai San, in Mae Ai district, Chiang Mai.
Thai media have long tied him to the network of Khun Sa. The warlord ran much of the Golden Triangle opium trade until the mid 1990s. Laota denied it. After a court cleared him in an earlier case, he and his sons denied ever dealing drugs or knowing Khun Sa.
Narcotics police caught him in a sting on 11 October 2016. Officers led by Pol Lt Gen Rewat Klinkesorn arrested him and members of his network at a petrol station in Mae Ai.
About 19 kilogrammes of crystal meth changed hands in the deal, worth roughly 11 million baht. Assets valued at more than 1 billion baht were seized from the network.
The Appeal Court upheld his conviction in December 2019. He was given life imprisonment and fined 2.5 million baht for conspiring to sell a Category 1 narcotic, alongside firearms offences.
His son Wicharn, a former kamnan, or subdistrict headman, of Tha Ton, was sentenced to death in the same case.
That leaves Laota having served close to 10 years of a life term. Thai royal pardon decrees, which the Department of Corrections proposes, commute life sentences to fixed terms in stages. Long-serving inmates can reach release much earlier than the original sentence suggests.
The prison said he qualified on the same terms as everyone else freed at the ceremony. All of them had finished vocational training and the royally initiated Kok Nong Na programme, which prepares prisoners for life outside.
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Source: Facebook/เรือนจำกลางบางขวาง (Bang Kwang Central Prison)
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