Inside Thai prison where Brit spent six months being ‘beaten, starved and treated like an animal’ after ex fleeced him
Ezra Feehan, 32, spent months in jail - despite never being charged with a crime - after an ex tipped authorities off to say he was working without a visa
A BRIT who spent six months in a Thai prison after being fleeced by an ex has told of the torture and abuse he suffered behind bars.
Ezra Feehan, 32, spent months in jail – despite never being charged with a crime – after an ex tipped authorities off to say he was working without a visa.
The Brit was left with nothing when his ex-wife took off with his money, travel documents and forced him out of the bar they owned together.
The pair fell in love about four months after Ezra arrived in Thailand in 2012, when they met on a boat from the mainland to Koh Samui.
They travelled as a couple for eight months before marrying later that year and returning to Koh Samui after their honeymoon, where they opened a bar together.
His wife then became “jealous” and left him, taking all his travel documents and making him unable to renew his visa.
She eventually returned with his belongings, but as the bar was in her name Ezra was forced into a bitter battle over ownership and ended up taking a job elsewhere.
Just days after reaching an agreement with his ex and starting work at another nearby bar, two Thai officers arrived at his workplace and arrested him for working on an expired visa – saying an ex had tipped them off.
Ezra told The Sun Online: “I was heartbroken, I was depressed, but I was starting to get my life back together.
“One morning I was cleaning the bar after a busy night, when two well dressed Thai guys came in. They spoke good English, and you always know a Thai guy’s official if he speaks good English.
“One of them asked to see my passport and it hit me, I thought: “Oh s**t, I haven’t renewed my visa.”
Ezra explains in Thailand you have to pay 500 baht for every day you go over your visa expiry date, but says the government can’t charge more than 20,000 baht -giving you a 40-day maximum limit you can stay over your visa expiry.
He said: “I’d gone over that. They just said: ‘Pack a suitcase, we’re taking you to a police station’.
“They said an ex-girlfriend of mine had called and said I was working without a visa. I don’t know if it was my ex-wife, or someone from before or after her.
“I don’t know who made the call, but next thing I knew I was in a tiny police cell in Koh Samui with 15 other people.”
The scaffolder says he first saw someone from the British consulate walk past his cell a couple of days after being arrested in Koh Samui.
But astonishingly when he asked for help Ezra claims he said there was no record of him being there – and said he had come to see other Brits.
It was nine days – which he spent crammed into a tiny cell with 15 others eating scraps of barely-edible food – before someone from the consulate finally saw Ezra for the first time.
Authorities said they were unable to help unless he gave them three phone numbers for people in the UK – which he did not know off the top of his head.
As a result Ezra remained stuck behind bars with seemingly no hope of escape.
He said: “I’m a vegetarian and they kept feeding me meat, even though I spoke enough Thai to explain my diet.
“I lost about a stone and a half of muscle. I spent two weeks in that cell with 15 people before they took me on a ferry to Suratanin.”
Ezra managed to take a few photos of the cell before he was moved to a smaller, more packed cell in Suratanin and had the Thai phone confiscated.
He said: “They took all my money off me. A woman would come to the cell to sell food and cigarettes.
“She’d charge 1,000 baht for something that should cost 50 and not give me any change. There was nothing I could do.”
Ezra says he was placed in a cell with 30 Cambodian and Burmese prisoners when taken to Suratanin.
He said: “The way the police treated them was subhuman. When the woman came round with food she would make them sit on the floor and beg for it like animals.
“Then she would just throw a handful of cold rice at them, in a bowl.”
Ezra eventually “kicked up a stink” about the treatment. He said: “I was like: ‘I ain’t f***ing sitting on the floor.
“‘I’m a British citizen. I haven’t committed any crime, I want a bit of dignity and some human rights.”
After a further 30 days Ezra was transferred to Rangon, up near Bangkok in a pick-up truck with a cage in the back.
He said: “There were 40 of us standing, squashed up against each other in this moving cage for four hours while they drove through the baking sun across mountains.
“We had no water, no food, nothing. We couldn’t even sit down.”
In a Rangon immigration detention centre, Ezra says he was put in a room with 160 Burmese militants and around 70 other people.
He said: “There were women mixed in with the men, all in this tiny little room. We stayed there for around three weeks. The food was atrocious.
“They’d bring a massive pot of rice and a pot of – I don’t know what it was – maybe chicken and we had to eat it because we were starving, but it was f***ing disgusting.
“Sometimes, if you were lucky, you’d get a chicken foot with a bit of meat on it.”
Eventually Ezra was taken to a Bangkok immigration detention centre, where the British consulate helped him and six other Brits who had been locked up for five months.
Ezra claims the men had not been seen by the consulate up until that point, and says: “They looked like they had come out of a prisoner of war camp.”
Their journey up to the Bangkok detention centre meant “another five hours in that caged truck, stuck in the same conditions with god knows how many people”.
He said: “In Bangkok, the human rights were disgusting. Regardless of your race, where you come from, your country – it was unreal.
“Honestly, banged up abroad makes it look like a holiday camp over here and that is no exaggeration.”
Ezra says conditions in the prisons he spent time in over those six months were harrowing.
It comes after an Amnesty International report released last week revealed damning descriptions of torture faced by dozens of Brits jailed in Thailand.
He said: “There were always between 70 and 100 people in one room. Everyone slept on the floor with a little blanket, folded in half so it’s half the width of your body and you’re in there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
“The bullying is rife in there. There were a couple of old guys who were always picked on by other prisoners, and there were constant scraps.
“The prison officers were just as bad. They didn’t even try to stop it. They had their anvil and their truncheon, and if you didn’t understand what they were saying – which most people didn’t – they’d just beat you up.
“Some guys had been in that room for eleven years because their countries wouldn’t take them back.”
The consulate eventually got hold of Ezra’s younger brother, Josh – six months after he had been arrested.
Josh transferred money into Ezra’s account to pay his deportation fee, flight ticket and some extra cash for when he arrived in England – and finally he was told he was leaving the grotty jail.
He said: “My flight was in the early hours of the morning. I spent all of the day before just waiting for that door to open.
“Eventually they came to take me to a holding cell. I sat with ten other people, each holding our suitcases, with no food or water waiting to leave.”
Ezra adds: “I was handcuffed to the floor of a ratty old pick up truck and taken to Suvarnabhumi Airport. I sat in the deportation holding room until it was time to board. My flight stopped off in Sri Lanka. I had 40 quid, a few thousand baht and seven hours to kill.
“They wouldn’t take either currency at the airport, and officials were holding my passport. I just had to sit, handcuffed to a chair, in six-month old clothes, unshaven, unwashed for seven hours.”
Ezra said: “And that was that. I was back in England and ready to start all over again. It’s been a long process and a lot of stress but I’m feeling positive now. Of course, I still think about it.
“It’s not easy. I question it, I spend hours thinking about it how I could have done things differently – but that’s life, you only get one and you’ve just got to get on with it.”
An FCO spokesperson said: “We provided support to a British national arrested in Thailand in August 2013.”
Thai authorities have been contacted for a comment.
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