Our correspondent in Bangkok, Hannah Borrowman, walked out of a bar last weekend to find a load of Thai guys sweeping up dead bodies into bin bags like they were massive sloppy portions of Massaman curry with coconut rice and minced chicken and prawn on toast, served with chilli and plum sauce, or something along those lines…She did a bit of investigation about what she had seen and has just sent us this report:(Be warned, the photos are fucking horrible).After dark, Bangkok (best known for its seedy nightlife and teeming traffic) is a drunken haze of cars and bars. This is where the tight brown uniforms of Bangkok's traffic police meets blood-soaked motorcycle leathers and giddy disco lights meet flashing police sirens. Clubbers coming home high on Yabba would be advised not to take the window seat unless they want to witness the city streets own lethal cocktail of crushed metal, ripped flesh and blinking neon, or the after hours spectacle of a sidewalk slick with brains. Much to the cops' chagrin, around 2000 illegal drag-racers make the most of the empty streets every night. Many of whom end up splattered all over the morning papers.Breakfast time in Bangkok and you're likely to be treated to a full-colour, front page photo of gore while you eat your porridge. In this deeply Buddhist society, these pictures aren't censored because they believe that only the dead deserve to die. Although a massive proportion of the road accident casualties end up in the infamous Bangkok Police Hospital, the otherwise invincible traffic cops usually hand over their jurisdiction to their own right hand men, the Body Snatchers of Bangkok. In a country with virtually no formal emergency services, these are the guys who step in where the boys in tight brown fear to tread. The job of rescuing the trapped, tending to the injured and cleaning up the city's streets at night goes to these corpse collectors, such as the Por Tek Teung charity, Thailand's premier group of professional body snatchers.As well as Buddhism, most Thais religiously believe in ghosts, with the most feared of all spirits being those who died violent deaths, such as car smash victims - the velocity of their death reputedly giving them extra power. Touching a dead body risks its spirit entering your own, but only cremation releases it to be reborn. For the boys on the body-snatching beat, who drive around in battered pickup trucks, their road to Nirvana is paved with deadly collisions. The prestige is such that full-scale battles occasionally break out over who gets the dead body and the associated karma. Police notoriously once had to fire warning shots to stop 40 of the corpse collectors (tooled-up with wooden clubs and hammers) from fighting six collectors from a rival group. In one of the most infamous confrontations, half a dozen body snatchers were hospitalized after a fight over a motorcyclist's body.The voluntary pursuit has cleaned up its act recently, and even taken on an edge of glamour, with Thai film stars and even fashion models taking to the streets to do their bit on live reality TV shows.
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