BANGKOK: A Pakistani man has been arrested on suspicion of smothering to death a Thai woman whom he met via an Internet chat room and then chopping up her body, police said on Wednesday. Muhammad Arif, a 33-year-old employee of a Thai shipping firm who could face execution by lethal injection, was arrested at a Bangkok hotel on Monday after a tip-off from a taxi driver, police confirmed. The taxi driver had telephoned the police to say that he had driven Arif, who had two bags in his possession, to a dumpsite in a city suburb. The bags were later recovered and found to contain the torso and other body parts of Disney Thongnakthae, a 28-year-old English language teacher from the northeastern province of Ubon Ratchathani. Her head was found on Tuesday in another bag dumped in a Bangkok canal, while her two feet were retrieved from a separate bag on Wednesday, police said.
They said that Arif had confessed to killing the woman in a fit of rage after she accused him of posting someone else's picture on the Internet and demanded that he pay her airfare home. "He confessed to killing her by smothering her with a pillow in the hotel room and couldn't figure out how to hide the body," Police Lieutenant-Colonel Soonthorn Kongklum said. "He then went to buy some knives to chop her up."