June 30, 2026
A 17-year-old Thai girl was on a lively strip of palm-fringed sand in the seaside city of Pattaya on Wednesday night, where a friend said she met a foreign man and struck up a conversation.
In the early hours of Thursday, they returned to his apartment, where she was strangled and killed, police said.
Two days later, Thai police said they found the teenager's naked corpse, stuffed inside a suitcase and dumped in waist-high grass, near a railway track, a short distance away from the beachfront.
At almost the same time as the body's discovery in the early hours of Saturday, Thai immigration authorities at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport apprehended a middle-aged Australian man as he prepared to board a flight out of the country.
