Surprise and disbelief have taken hold of a family in northern Thailand after reuniting with one of their members whom they had buried on January 9th. Apparently, the relatives of the 48-year-old man had received news of his death in Chiang Mai. Thus, they organized a funeral in his hometown Chiang Rai with the body inside the coffin. However, two weeks later, on January 24th, the man unexpectedly appeared at his home, as reported by the Thai newspaper Khaosod.
The shocked family members couldn’t understand how the man they had said goodbye to and to whom they had professed various traditional rituals was standing alive before them. Thus, after a few moments of disbelief and joy, they sought answers from the Mae Chan rescue unit in order to exhume the buried body and discover its true identity.
With quick action, the 48-year-old man was able to identify the lifeless body that lay inside the coffin: it was a friend with whom he lived and worked in Chiang Mai. Apparently, the deceased was carrying his companion’s identity document at the time of his death. This confusion led rescuers to mistakenly identify the body as that of the man who eventually returned home alive.
The body has been delivered to the family
To carry out the exhumation of the body, the family requested the intervention of the Thap Yang Sataranakusol Foundation in order to expedite the process. The rescuers removed the corpse, changed the
shroud -a cloth placed over the body of the deceased when they are buried- and placed it in a new coffin to transport it to the
hospital. Once there, his true relatives received the deceased.
Subsequently, their legitimate relatives performed religious ceremonies based on their beliefs. The communities of the
Akha ethnic group, to which those affected belong, have economies based on subsistence agriculture and present conditions of poverty. Despite this, they possess a powerful cultural richness and maintain
animistic beliefs, in which the world of spirits occupies a central place in daily life.
In this regard, the local community has shown particular concern, as traditional beliefs consider it inappropriate to bring the body of a person outside the village, as has happened after the definitive identification of the deceased. Faced with this,
a medium performed a spiritual ritual to ward off misfortune and apologize to the spiritual powers respected by the community.
For his part, the father of the man they believed dead,
Aryuay, 66 years old, has stated that he does not know the reason why his son’s friend had his identification document in his possession. In addition, after what happened, the 48-year-old man had not explained it to him either, as he commented to
The Thaiger.
Another administrative resurrection in Thailand
The identification of corpses in Thailand depends primarily on the identity document, as stated in the Civil Registration Act BE 2534. Thus, the absence of
biometric verification systematically increases the risk of a documentary error that leads to an ‘administrative resurrection’.
However, once the
death certificate has been issued, the affected person would face a complex process to recover their civil rights, which requires DNA evidence or official testimony, and which implies the immediate freezing of bank accounts, according to reports from
La Dépêche.
So, although it may seem that this is an isolated incident, the reality is that this is added to the
list of incidents of the Asian country in this circumstance. A similar event in January of last year left a man surprised when he arrived at his house, because there he saw how his family was celebrating his funeral after a mistaken identification by the police.
Similarly, another previous situation, exposed in the
Bangkok Post, another man “lived for many years in misery without identity documents, deprived of the social rights of a Thai citizen” after having been declared dead by
administrative error in 1997.
