Beating Pattaya’s Burglars

[Pattaya One]

A Thai friend of mine was recently burgled in Pattaya.

Three years ago he bought a safe.

After he'd read all the stories about small safes in  Pattaya’s hotel rooms being walked out the door, never to be seen again,  and deciding even slightly larger ones were too prone to being carried off  by a couple of burly  thieves, he went for a major upgrade and bought himself one that had to be carried into his house and up the stairs by FOUR men.

And there it sat unmolested for 3 years until recently, when his house was burgled while he and his wife were at work.

The burglar appeared to be professional and determined. He'd spent a lot of time breaking into the house, patiently trying different ways in, yet there were no fingerprints left on any surface inside or out, or on the safe itself.

Once inside, the the forensic evidence (such as it was, or ever is here – probably the remains of a packed lunch and a sleeping bag) suggested the burglar had spent many hours trying to get into the safe.

He couldn't work out the combination for the outer door, but he eventually succeeded in taking off the handle and the combination lock, and then removing the outer door of the safe.

After all the trouble of doing that, there was another door with another locking mechanism inside, which he could never have got into, and which forced him to give up, after what the police said looked like many hours of hard work.

Although the safe is now ruined (the photo shows the state of it after my friend had got someone in to open it with a thermal lance because the second, damaged door couldn’t be removed), and ignoring the fact his home was burgled, my friend was happy that his safe had withstood such a determined assault, and he plans to buy a new one, even more sophisticated than this.

The burglar was reduced to stealing some Buddha images from the family shrine, which my friend hoped would guarantee the thief gets what he deserved both in this life and the next.

And the moral of the story is, if it’s valuable enough, buy a big safe.

The bigger the better in Pattaya.

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