What happened to David Fletcher’s
passport?
“On June 27th,
2010, David Fletcher was approached in
his Bangkok hotel by three Thais who told him that the British embassy wanted
to talk with him. Would they accompany them? Mr Fletcher agreed. The men were
not in uniforms and had no warrant for his arrest.
Fletcher
accompanied the three Thai men, who took his passport and placed him in a cell
at the Immigration Detention Centre in Bangkok.
On Tuesday 29th
June, 2010, Ray Keen visited Mr Fletcher in his cell and informed him that he
was from the British embassy.
According to Mr
Fletcher, Ray Keen produced his passport (given to the embassy by the Thai
police) and said the embassy would look after it for him.
In Dec 2012,
when a Thai court recommended that he be returned to the UK, Mr Fletcher asked
the British embassy to return his passport. He was told that it had been
‘accidentally destroyed’.
A key part of
David Fletcher’s defense against the charge that he raped Yang Dany on 15th
and 22nd March 2009 is that he was not in Cambodia in March 2009.
The evidence for this, Mr Fletcher claims, is to be found in his passport.
In order find
out more about the whereabouts of David Fletcher’s passport, and its fate, I
wrote to the British Ambassador to Thailand.
Mr Mark Kent
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
British Ambassador to Thailand
14th September 2014
Dear Mr Kent
I am an Australian filmmaker,
currently resident in Cambodia, conducting research for both a book and a
documentary about David John Fletcher – convicted by a Cambodian court in
absentia to 10 years in jail for rape.
In the course of my investigations I
am gathering together as much information as I can that may be relevant to my
book and film. It is, of course, imperative that the documentary be factually
correct and that I do not leave myself open to accusations of bias or to being
sued for defamation by any of those who, it seems on the basis of my initial
research, have either conspired to have Mr Fletcher falsely charged or who have
turned a blind eye to such a conspiracy if it has occurred. Hence this
exploratory email.
I do have permission from Mr Fletcher
to ask the questions I wish to ask and to make observations arising from my
initial research. (I provided written permission from Mr Fletcher – signed and
thumb-printed.)
My first questions have to do with
the role that The British Embassy in Bangkok played in the cancellation and, it
would appear, the destruction of Mr Fletcher’s passport:
1. On what date did the British
Embassy cancel Mr Fletcher’s passport?
2. Why did the British Embassy cancel
Mr Fletcher’s passport?
3. Who made the decision to cancel Mr
Fletcher’s passport?
4. Was Mr Fletcher’s cancelled
passport then destroyed?
5. If so, why was the passport
destroyed?
6. Who was responsible for the
destruction of Mr Fletcher’s passport?
7. If both the cancellation of the
passport were accidental, why was Mr Fletcher not provided, immediately, with a
new passport free of charge?
8. It is the normal custom in the UK,
when a passport is cancelled, that the corners and the front page are removed.
Why was this procedure not adhered to but, it seems, the entire passport
destroyed?
9. Is it legal for any person,
including those working within a British Embassy, to destroy the passport of a
British citizen?
10. Before the British Embassy
decided to destroy Mr Fletcher’s passport, were the pages within it
photocopied? The dates of Mr. Fletcher’s travels in and out of both Thailand
and Cambodia up to and including the dates of the alleged rapes is relevant to
his legal position vis a vis the Phnom Penh Municipal court.
11. Given the seriousness of the
charges laid against Mr Fletcher and the relevance of the dates of his travel
in and out of both Cambodia and Thailand it is hard to imagine that copies of
the pages of his passport were not made prior to its destruction. Will Mr
Fletcher be provided with copies of these pages?
Ambassador Mark
Kent did not acknowledge receipt of my letter but, after several letters to the
Foreign Secretary, Mr Phillip Hammond, it was recommended that I make an
application under Freedom of Information legislation to acquire answers to the
above 11 questions asked of Mr Kent.
Three weeks later
I received a letter, the most pertinent part of which reads:
Outcome of Search
I am writing to confirm that the FCO
does have information relevant to your request. However, we are withholding
this information for the reasons set out below.
Section 40 Personal Data
The withheld information is personal
data relating to third parties. It is our view that disclosure of this
information would breach the first data protection principle, which states that
personal data should be processed fairly and lawfully. Section 40(2) and (3) of
the Freedom of Information Act therefore apply. It is the fairness aspect of
this principle which we believe would be breached by disclosure in this case.
In such circumstances section 40 confers an absolute exemption on disclosure.
We do not therefore have to apply the public interest test.
Yours sincerely,
Sue
Bennett
Sue Bennett
Deputy Head of Customer
Interaction Team Consular Directorate.
I wondered what possible good reason Sue Bennett
could have for not answering any questions at all relating to Mr Fletcher’s
‘disappeared’ passport!
I dashed off a quick response:
Dear Sue Bennett
Your letter of 6th Oct is
bureaucratic twaddle. I will respond in due course to the nonsense
you write but you may be interested to read the latest letter I have written to
others who, like yourself, are committed to finding bureaucratic justification
for their refusal to answer what is, in reality a very simple question:
"What happened to Mr Fletcher's passport?" (see attached letter to
Conor Doherty dated 2nd Oct)
The more obfuscation you and
your colleagues bring to this question the clearer becomes the answer to any
sensible person - a decision has been made at quite a high level that Mr
Fletcher's passport 'disappear' and that any and every effort must be made to
guarantee that no-one ever knows why is disappeared or who was responsible for
the decision that it should be 'accidentally destroyed'. If this means that Mr
Fletcher is unable to present to the court evidence in his own defense, to be
found in his passport or photocopies of pages from it, so be it!
Conor
Doherty
Thailand,
Burma, Laos and Cambodia Desk
Consular
Directorate
Foreign
& Commonwealth Office
King
Charles Street
London
SW1A 2AH
2nd October 2014
Dear
Conor
Mr Vong Moneath, Mr Fletcher’s
Khmer lawyer made enquiries similar to my own regarding his client’s passport.
He received an automated reply which begins as follows:
Thank you for
emailing Info.Bangkok@fco.gov.uk. This is an automated response. In order to
resolve your query as quickly as possible, please check carefully whether the
information you need can be found in any of the links below…etc
Clearly,
the FCO is going to do everything it can to thwart Mr Fletcher’s lawyer, Mr
Vong Moneath’s and my own attempts to find out precisely what happened to the missing
passport. Given the lack of answers coming from the office of the Foreign
Secretary, or from yourself, I must resort to conjecture.
I
have a few theories as to how Mr
Fletcher’s passport was ‘accidentally destroyed’ but the following is the only one
that accounts for all the known facts. This is a rather poor translation from
court documents but there is no doubt about the gist of it:
“The SISHA Organization to Phnom
Penh realized the information of departure of David John Fletcher for Thailand
through Poipet, and also notified the UK Embassy to Thailand of the suspected
history that this person can committed the sexual offense to the Cambodian
children in Phnom Penh. After receipt of the information, the UK Embassy to
Bangkok notified the Thai police of the offense in which David John Fletcher
committed in Phnom Penh. In the evening on Sunday 27 June 2010, David John
Fletcher was arrested by the Thai police at the guesthouse named SOM
GUESTHOUSE…”
So, on the basis of information
provided to it by SISHA the British Embassy in Thailand arranged for Mr
Fletcher to be arrested by the Thai police upon his arrival in Thailand. At
this point no arrest warrant for Mr Fletcher had been drawn up in Cambodia. At
this point the only information that the British Embassy had at its disposal
regarding Mr Fletcher’s alleged crimes was an article published by Andrew
Drummond a week beforehand, on 20th June. And whatever it had been
told by SISHA.
There is no mention in Mr
Drummond’s article of the alleged rapes from the previous year and no
suggestion from SISHA that any rape had occurred. Indeed, the woman Mr Fletcher
is alleged to have raped, Yang Dany, is referred to in Mr Drummond’s article as
his ‘fiance’ who Drummond quotes as saying the Mr Fletcher is a good man.
The closest Mr Drummond’s article
comes to accusing Mr Fletcher of a crime are the quotes he includes from Scott
Neeson:
“…people like Fletcher
are a continuous source of worry. There is little doubt Fletcher devotes his
time to grooming young girls. The fact is these children can be bought. It’s
difficult to stop it. The British Embassy have been told about Fletcher. Many
organizations have files on him, but nothing has happened. If you can get this
guy sent packing you are doing a service to the children here.”
So,
the British Embassy had been told about Fletcher by Scott Neeson (and possibly
others) and had tipped off the Thai police that he was about to enter Thailand
– a week after Andrew Drummond’s article of 20th June 2010.
The
word ‘flee’ has been used by many a journalist to describe what Mr Fletcher did
when Mr Drummond’s article as published. In fact he stayed in Phnom Penh for
six more days, giving many of his more precious possessions to Yang Dany and
her mother Sekun. He did not flee. There was no warrant for Mr Fletcher’s
arrest and he had not been interviewed
by the Anti Human Trafficking or any other police. Nor had he been interviewed
by APLE or SISHA. Yang Dany had not told any of the NGOs mentioned in Mr
Drummond’s article that she had been raped or mistreated by Nr Fletcher in any
way. Indeed, Yang Dany referred to Mr Fletcher as a ‘good man’.
When
the relevant paperwork was prepared by the Cambodian police and courts the
dates given for the rapes were 15th March 2009 and 22nd
March 2009. Someone at the British Embassy in Thailand (or perhaps more than
one person) looked at Mr Fletcher’s
passport, realized that he was not in Cambodia at the time of the alleged rapes
and panicked. Mr Fletcher could not possibly have committed the rapes on these
dates if he was not in the country at the time. This was an embarrassing
development, given the British Embassy’s complicity on arranging for Mr
Fletcher’s arrest as soon as he arrived in Thailand on the basis of Mr
Drummond’s sensationalist tabloid article.
So,
a decision was made by someone (or more than one person) within the British
Embassy to see to it that Mr Fletcher’s passport ‘disappeared’. This saved the
British Embassy from some considerable embarrassment but, at the same time,
necessitated the destruction of evidence that Mr Fletcher could use in court to
prove his innocence.
This
sounds like a plot line out of a John le Carre spy thriller but it is the only
explanation that I have been able to come up with as to why Mr Fletcher’s
passport disappeared under the circumstances that prevailed.
You
could so easily, Conor, convince Mr Fletcher and myself (and the readers of my
book) that the conjecture I have just
indulged in is just that – an unlikely plot line from a John Le Carre-style
novel. All that is required is that you
provide a logical explanation for the disappearance of Mr Fletcher’s passport.
Your
website makes it quite clear that the British Embassy does not interfere with
the internal workings of its host government. In reality, the British Embassy
did interfere when, on the basis of a demonstrably factually incorrect article
by a hack journalist, it arranged for Mr Fletcher’s arrest in Thailand.
You
must now ‘interfere’ again by providing the Phnom Penh Municipal Court with Mr
Fletcher’s passport or, if it has been destroyed, with a letter to the court
explaining that Mr Fletcher is unable to prove that he was not in Cambodia at
the time of the alleged rapes because the British Embassy dog ate it or
whatever explanation you can come up with to explain the passport’s
non-existence today.
best
wishes
James
Ricketson
Mr Conor Doherty has not
acknowledged receipt of this letter.
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