Acting on intelligence that drugs would be smuggled across the Mekong from Laos, the Nakhon Phanom riverine command sent its Nong Khai vessel unit and Rattanawapi boat station together with So Phisai police and Border Patrol Police Company 244 to stake out the riverbank on 17 October.[1] Two motorized fishing boats crossed from Laos and beached at Ban Ton Yai in Rattanawapi, where about six men loaded fertilizer sacks into a waiting brown Isuzu D-Max box-body pickup; when officers moved in, the driver sped off.[1]
Police and soldiers set checkpoints along Route 212 into Bueng Kan, and near the So Phisai fresh market they boxed the pickup in and arrested the driver, 22-year-old Thongchai Konthong of Nakhon Pathom, and passenger Phairat Phusri, 30.[1] Inside the cargo box, under black plastic sheeting, officers found 13 fertilizer sacks holding 494 pressed bars of dried cannabis weighing 494 kilograms and valued at about 9.9 million baht.[1][2]
The two men told interrogators they had been hired for 30,000 baht to drive the load to a petrol station in Wang Noi, Ayutthaya, for onward transport south and abroad, and had done the run three times before.[1] Police charged both with jointly bringing Category 5 narcotics into the kingdom illegally and handed them to the So Phisai duty officer with the cannabis as evidence.[1]
