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There are plenty of strategies criminals can deploy to decrease the risk of having their identity revealed while they’re committing an illegal act. One man in Thailand was hoping to check that box by chanting a spell to make himself invisible before robbing a Buddhist temple, but he was arrested after it failed to have the intended effect.
Buddhism is overwhelmingly the most popular religion in Thailand, as more than 90% of the people who reside in the country subscribe to that particular philosophy. It is also home to around 45,000 Buddhist temples known as “wats,” which are watched over by the hundreds of thousands of monks who’ve been ordained there.
Those monks take a vow of poverty that requires them to rely on the charity of others to survive, and many of those temples have donation boxes where visitors can leave money that helps them subsist.
An iconic complex in Bangkok was recently the site of a robbery where two of those boxes were raided, and it didn’t take authorities very long to track down a culprit who was let down by the spell he cast before the heist.
A man who chanted an invisibility spell before robbing a temple in Bangkok was arrested after the crime was captured on camera
Bangkok’s Wat Pho is one of six locations in Thailand that sit in the top tier of the 23 places classified as “first-class royal temples.” It has a history that stretches back to the 1500s, and is also referred to as the “Temple of the Reclining Buddha” due to the massive 150-foot-long statue of the founding figure located on its grounds.
According to Khaosod, police were dispatched to Wat Pho on May 30th after receiving a call concerning a robbery linked to two donation boxes that had been smashed open by a thief who stole 2,000 baht (around $60). They viewed security footage that captured a man with a white shirt wrapped around his head committing the crime, and they only needed a few days to apprehend the suspect, a 43-year-old security guard identified as “Ratchathan.”
Officials say he confessed to the crime while saying he needed the money to pay his rent, and he told them that “he apologised to the temple’s sacred spirits and recited what he described as a ‘concealment spell’ that he believed would prevent others from noticing him” before committing it.
Unfortunately for him, it did not work as he had hoped, and he was subsequently charged with nighttime theft, trespassing at night, criminal damage, and concealing his identity while committing an offence.