A former Thai police chief who was jailed for life three years ago for torturing a drug suspect to death has been found dead in his Bangkok jail cell, authorities said.

Thitisan Utthanaphon, who was nicknamed Joe Ferrari for his many luxury cars, died by suicide, according to a preliminary autopsy.

In 2021, a leaked video showed Thitisan and his colleagues wrapping plastic bags around the head of a 24-year-old drug suspect during an interrogation, leading to the suspect’s death.

The video sparked national outrage at that time over police brutality in Thailand. It has made fresh rounds on social media in the wake of Thitisant’s death.

Thailand’s justice ministry has launched an investigation into his death after his family expressed doubts that he killed himself. Further tests were needed to confirm that he had indeed died in a suicide, authorities said.

Justice minister Tawee Sodsong said on Monday that all evidence related to Thitisant’s death should be disclosed, and urged prison authorities to cooperate with investigators.

The family said Thitisant was previously assaulted by a prison staffer. They said officials did not allow them to see his body, which was found in his cell on Friday.

But on Sunday authorities said “no prison officer or inmate has harmed or caused [his] death”.

A previous raid on Thitisant’s house revealed that he owned a dozen luxury sportscars. Authorities believe he owned at least 42, one of them a rare Lamborghini Aventador Anniversario, of which only 100 were made, priced in Thailand at 47 million baht ($1.45m; £1.05m).

As a police colonel, Thitisant was paid about $1,000 a month.

There were allegations that he demanded bribes from the suspect in the viral video, Jirapong Thanapat, while suffocating him. Thitisant denied this.

Thitisant surrendered in 2021 following a manhunt.

Besides Thitisant, five other police officers were convicted of murdering Jirapong and were also sentenced to life in prison in 2022.

“It’s like he has paid off the karma he committed,” Jirapong’s father said in an interview on local media on Saturday.

The Department of Corrections said they had been investigating a previous complaint filed by Thitisant’s family alleging that he had been bullied and assaulted by prison officers earlier this year.

Thitisant had consulted doctors over anxiety issues and trouble sleeping, the department said.

His family visited him on the day that he died and prison staff did not notice any “abnormalities”, it said.

[BBC]

Hackers thought to be working for the North Korean regime have successfully cashed out at least $300m (£232m) of their record-breaking $1.5bn crypto heist.

The criminals, known as Lazarus Group, swiped the huge haul of digital tokens in a hack on crypto exchange ByBit two weeks ago.

Since then, it’s been a cat-and-mouse game to track and block the hackers from successfully converting the crypto into usable cash.

Experts say the infamous hacking team is working nearly 24 hours a day – potentially funnelling the money into the regime’s military development.

“Every minute matters for the hackers who are trying to confuse the money trail and they are extremely sophisticated in what they’re doing,” says Dr Tom Robinson, co-founder of crypto investigators Elliptic.

Out of all the criminal actors involved in crypto currency, North Korea is the best at laundering crypto, Dr Robinson says.

“I imagine they have an entire room of people doing this using automated tools and years of experience. We can also see from their activity that they only take a few hours break each day, possibly working in shifts to get the crypto turned into cash.”

Elliptic’s analysis tallies with ByBit, which says that 20% of the funds have now “gone dark”, meaning it is unlikely to ever be recovered.

The US and allies accuse the North Koreans of carrying out dozens of hacks in recent years to fund the regime’s military and nuclear development.

On 21 February the criminals hacked one of ByBit’s suppliers to secretly alter the digital wallet address that 401,000 Ethereum crypto coins were being sent to.

ByBit thought it was transferring the funds to its own digital wallet, but instead sent it all to the hackers.

Ben Zhou, the CEO of ByBit, assured customers that none of their funds had been taken.

The firm has since replenished the stolen coins with loans from investors, but is in Zhou’s words “waging war on Lazarus”.

ByBit’s Lazarus Bounty programme is encouraging members of the public to trace the stolen funds and get them frozen where possible.

All crypto transactions are displayed on a public blockchain, so it’s possible to track the money as it’s moved around by the Lazarus Group.

If the hackers try to use a mainstream crypto service to attempt to turn the coins into normal money like dollars, the crypto coins can be frozen by the company if they think they are linked to crime.

So far 20 people have shared more than $4m in rewards for successfully identifying $40m of the stolen money and alerting crypto firms to block transfers.

But experts are downbeat about the chances of the rest of the funds being recoverable, given the North Korean expertise in hacking and laundering the money.

“North Korea is a very closed system and closed economy so they created a successful industry for hacking and laundering and they don’t care about the negative impression of cyber crime,” Dr Dorit Dor from cyber security company Check Point said.

Another problem is that not all crypto companies are as willing to help as others.

Crypto exchange eXch is being accused by ByBit and others of not stopping the criminals cashing out.

More than $90m has been successfully funnelled through this exchange.

But over email the elusive owner of eXch – Johann Roberts – disputed that.

He admits they didn’t initially stop the funds, as his company is in a long-running dispute with ByBit, and he says his team wasn’t sure the coins were definitely from the hack.

He says he is now co-operating, but argues that mainstream companies that identify crypto customers are abandoning the private and anonymous benefits of crypto currency.

The US Secret Service shot a man outside the White House early on Sunday after an “armed confrontation”, the service said in a statement.

It had earlier received a tip-off from local police about a “suicidal individual who may be travelling to Washington DC from Indiana”, it said.

Its officers approached a man matching that description, “who brandished a firearm”, adding that shots were fired. The man is now in hospital in an “unknown” condition, it said.

President Donald Trump was not in the White House at the time, as he is spending the weekend at his Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago.