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A Blue Diamond Affair: the Geopolitics of a Heist
The Saudi crown prince just arrived in Thailand, marking the end of a three decade diplomatic dispute involving a jewel heist, four grisly murders, and a geopolitical gemstone mystery.
November 18
Mohammed Bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s murderous crown prince, arrived in Bangkok on Thursday evening. It may seem like a normal head of state visit, as MBS touched down in Thailand for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
But there’s much more to this story than meets the eye. His arrival, and the official welcome that he received, marks the end of a thirty year saga involving a gardener thief, a very large blue diamond, and a series of grisly murders that tore the two countries apart and severed diplomatic relations for decades.
It’s a story of intrigue, but it’s also a story of shifting geopolitics. And it’s particularly relevant now, as the World Cup is about to open in neighboring Qatar, where imported Asian workers continue to be subjected to abysmal working conditions.
In 1989, a Thai gardener named Kriangkrai Techamong was working in the palace of Faisal bin Fahd Al Saud, the eldest son of King Fahd in Saudi Arabia. Kriangkrai was a garden servant, tending to the lush greenery around the desert palace, but every so often, he was asked to perform tasks inside the living quarters.
It was a workplace of grotesque inequality, with imported Asian workers performing menial labor, while the House of Saud lived a life of luxury, driving around in flashy cars, but most of all, displaying their sparkling collections of nearly priceless jewels. There were rubies the size of chicken eggs. But one of the gems particularly caught the gardener’s eye: an enormous 50 carat blue diamond, one of the finest of its kind anywhere in the world.
When his masters embarked on a three month trip abroad, Kriangkrai spotted an opportunity to change his fortunes.
The gems, he knew, were kept in a bedroom safe on the second story of the palace. He hatched a plot that was so crazy that it might just work. In the middle of the night, he climbed up the side of the palace and entered the second story bedroom. He smashed open the safe—apparently not the most secure storage place for valuable gems, it turned out—and descended with 200 pounds of gemstones and jewelry.
The gardener didn’t know it at the time, but he had just stolen $20 million from the Saudi royal family.
What do you do when you have 90 kilograms of gems and need to get them out of a country quickly? The answer came to Kriangkrai in a flash of brilliance: stick them in a vacuum cleaner bag and ship them home via DHL. So, that’s what he did. As planned, the stolen jewels arrived in Lampang Province, Thailand a few days later.
Worried his shipment would be searched, Kriangkrai told the BBC how he had tried to ensure that Thai customs officials wouldn’t discover the gems. “Kriangkrai stuffed an envelope with money and a note and put it in his cargo. The note said his cargo had pornographic material inside, and he would prefer it not to be searched.”
Saudi authorities quickly figured out what had happened. They notified Thai officials, who began their own investigation. By that time, Kriangkrai had returned home, able to easily get through the airport unnoticed because the jewels had already been shipped back separately. But he knew that the authorities would soon come knocking on his door.
When a modest man wearing inexpensive clothes arrives at a gemstone dealer with one of the most spectacular blue diamonds in the world, it doesn’t take Hercule Poirot to work out what’s going on. And that’s why Kriangkrai only managed to offload the gemstones—at a tiny fraction of their true value—to a dealer named Santhi Sithanakan.
Because this wasn’t the most well-planned heist, police quickly caught Kriangkrai. He told them where the gems had gone, so they caught Santhi, too. A delegation of Thai officials flew to Saudi Arabia to triumphantly return the stolen jewels.
When they arrived, the Saudis were furious to realize that the blue diamond was still missing. And it turned out that half of the returned gems were fakes, swapped out for the real ones, which were nowhere to be found. At the same time, photos began to circulate showing high-ranking Thai officials, some who had connections to the police, wearing suspiciously large gemstones on glitzy necklaces.
The Saudis suspected foul play, and sent a delegation to Bangkok to lead their own investigation. It included three diplomatic officials and a well-connected businessman named Mohammad al-Ruwaili. On February 1st, 1990, “Saudi chargé d'affaires Abdullah al-Basri was standing outside his residence in the upscale Thung Maha Mek area of Bangkok.” An assassin came up to him and shot him four times. His pregnant wife discovered the body. Minutes later, the other two diplomats were murdered, shot dead while in their car. A little over a week later, al-Rawaili disappeared. His body has never been found.
Despite appearances, most who have investigated the cases believe that the Thai police did not kill these Saudi officials, but rather that they were murdered by Iran, or by Hezbollah, in a separate dispute – and they were simply easier to get at in Bangkok.
However, Thai police came up with a bogus theory: that the businessman, al-Rawaili, had been behind the murders. According to Andrew MacGregor-Marshall, one of the foremost experts on modern Thai politics, Thai police “kidnapped Ruwaili and took him to a room in the Chimphli Hotel in Khlong Tan where they chained him to a chair and tortured him… They incinerated his corpse in an oil drum in a plantation in the Surasak subdistrict of the Si Racha district in Chonburi province, between Bangkok and Pattaya.” The only thing that remained was a gold ring.
So, what happened to the gems, and what does it tell us about geopolitics during the era of Biden and Xi that Saudi Arabia and Thailand are starting to make nice?
