Thailand asks Britain to extradite convicted former PM Yingluck

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Thailand has asked Britain to extradite former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra, who was overthrown in a coup in 2014 and sentenced in absentia to jail for negligence, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha said on Tuesday.

Yingluck fled the country last August to avoid being jailed over a rice subsidy scheme that ran up losses in the billions of dollars. She has denied wrongdoing and said the trial was politically motivated.

The Supreme Court sentenced her in absentia to five years’ jail last September.

Former Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra arrives at the Constitutional Court to stand trial for negligence over a rice pledging scheme in Bangkok, November 4, 2016. /VCG Photo

Prayuth said the request was a necessary procedure between the two countries which share an extradition treaty.

“We cannot go and arrest people abroad so it is up to that country to arrest and send (her) to us,” he said.

Yingluck and her brother, ousted former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, have been at the center of a power struggle that has dominated Thai politics for more than a decade, pitting traditional royalists and the military elite against the Shinawatra family and their supporters in the rural north and northeast.

(Top image: Former Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra speaks to the media as she arrives at the Supreme Court in Bangkok, July 21, 2017. /VCG Photo)

Source(s): Reuters