Mysterious Case files.
The Mysterious suicide of Nara Pech
It all started on January 14th, 2015.
That’s when 28-year-old Canadian, Nara Pech arrived with his friends in Bangkok on a flight
from Toronto.
They were excited about their trip to southeast Asia.
Nara’s travels would take him into Cambodia and then a few days later into neighboring
Laos.
Within a week Nara was found dead at the airport in Vientiane, Laos.
Just prior to that he had called his family and told them he was on his way back home
to Canada.
He also said some other things that the family would find absolutely chilling once they learned
he had died.
“Please I’m in Laos, and they’re trying to hurt me.
I need help, Dad.”
The official verdict was that Nara Pech had committed suicide at the airport in Laos.
However, his family were not convinced.
They believe he was murdered.
There are experts who agree with his family.
So, do the family and experts have a point?
Was there evidence of possible foul play?
This video will explore the strange and mysterious death of Nara Pech.
The Start of a Great Trip
Family would later say how Nara had gone on the trip in order to reconnect with his roots.
He was of Cambodian descent and his family had fled the horrors of the murderous Khmer
Rouge regime that ruled Cambodia in the 1970s. The family ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand
before eventually settling in 1986, in Edmonton, Canada, where Nara was born.
The trip was also meant to celebrate his recent graduation from Toronto's York University,
where he had obtained a double major with honors in sociology and anthropology.
So, it was an important, much-anticipated trip for Nara.
By Day 2 of the trip, Nara and his two friends were in Cambodia.
They were staying in Siem Reap and enjoying the splendors of Angkor Wat, the enormous
temple complex in northwest Cambodia and largest religious monument in the world.
They were enthralled with the UNECSO World Heritage Site.
After three days the group headed to Cambodia’s bustling capital, Phnom Penh.
Two days later they were on a bus to Vietnam but got off after just ten minutes.
The reason?
Nara convinced his friends they were about to be robbed by people on the bus.
The group decided to instead fly to Laos that night.
Nara informed his friends that he wanted to return home to Canada upon the group’s arrival
in Vientiane, Laos.
Nara felt homesick and wanted to return to his fiancée in Toronto.
The other two decided they wanted to stay in Laos.
His friends accompanied him to the international airport in Vientiane and even watched him
go through customs.
That was the last his friends ever saw of him.
Nara would be dead within a few hours.
The Last Phone Calls.
That same day, Nara made calls to Canada.
He left not one but three separate messages on the voicemails of his family, fiancées
family, and a friend.
He had also tried to reach his fiancee, who he'd been dating since he was 15 and set to
marry the following year in 2016.
However, she was unavailable when he called as she’d accidentally left her phone at
home that day.
In those messages Nara said he was stuck at the Laos airport.
His voice was hurried and distressed.
“I’m in Laos and they’re trying to hurt me.
I need help, Dad.
Call the embassy, please”.
Nara’s messages continued with:
“The guards, the taxi drivers, everything are involved in this.
I’m stuck here, they’ve blocked my wifi.
They took my boarding pass away.
Everybody is trying to get me to leave the airport, so they can kill me.
It’s a bad situation, I just need somebody to know”
Nara’s voice messages to his family concluded with - “The security guards, everybody.
They're trying to ***ing kill me.
I need your help man!”
He then hung up.
It was the last time anyone would ever hear his voice.
Family members would only hear his frantic voice messages a few days later.
A Family is Informed
It was Nara’s father who first got the news about Nara’s death from police in Toronto.
He also heard the account from the police in Laos regarding his son's death via a consular
official in Ottawa.
The family was informed that Nara had committed suicide.
His sister, Sarena Armsworthy, who was living in their hometown of Edmonton, couldn’t
believe it when she got the call about her brother’s untimely death.
She found it especially difficult to believe reports from Laotian police that her brother
had died of three self-inflicted stab wounds to the neck.
The Official Version
According to police in Laos, Nara Pech was found dead at Wattay International Airport,
the main airport in Vientiane.
According to his death certificate, Nara died at 3 a.m. on January 22nd, 2015.
The police stated he had died due to three self-inflicted stab wounds using broken glass
from a vending machine.
Laotian police claim that they found four knives at the scene.
Photos of the scene show what appears to be a restaurant located inside the airport.
There were pools of blood on the floor and spatters around Nara’s body.
It should be noted that eyewitness reports of the actual alleged suicide are non-existent,
or, at least, have not been divulged by Laotian police.
The Immediate Aftermath
Australian consular officials were called in to identify the body since there was no
Canadian embassy in Laos.
That same day, Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development were notified
about Nara’s death.
It was then that Canadian officials in turn notified the Pech family about his passing.
Two days later, a consular official from the Canadian Embassy in Thailand went to Laos
to view the death site and the morgue to meet with police.
The same official went to a local funeral home to authorize the release of Nara’s
body.
It didn’t help that Laotian authorities disclosed very little information.
All the Laotian police did was declare Pech’s death a ‘suicide by stabbing’.
Nara’s family were not convinced about his suicide and so they requested an autopsy be
undertaken.
However, the family insisted it be done in Thailand, and not Laos.
As such, The autopsy was performed in Thailand on February 2nd, 2015.
On that same day, the Pech family also received Nara’s Laotian death certificate.
Nara’s body was repatriated back to Canada on February 8th, 2015.
Two days later, a Pech family representative allowed Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs
to liaise with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
The RCMP were made aware of Nara Pech’s untimely and somewhat suspicious death in
a foreign country.
Nara’s funeral was held on February 16th, 2015.
Five hundred people packed a hall in Newmarket, Ontario, to celebrate the young man’s life.
A Bureaucratic Nightmare for A Sister
More than a month after the funeral, Nara’s sister, Sarena, contacted the RCMP for a follow-up
regarding her brother’s death.
The RCMP replied that it still hadn’t launched an investigation.
Three weeks later, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs formally requested that
the RCMP investigate Nara’s death in Laos.
Weeks went by with Sarena getting stalled by all involved.
She became so upset about the lack of investigation by the RCMP and further inaction of the country’s
Department of Foreign Affairs, that she contacted Canada’s Global News network.
Her brother’s story aired on the network on May 30th, 2015, and went national within
a few days.
Finally, on July 2nd, 2015, Canadian consular officials met with the Laotian Ministry of
Foreign Affairs.
The Canadians asked for updates on the Nara Pech investigation.
However, that proved a dead-end.
On August 6th, 2015, Sarena contacted the RCMP for the umpteenth time regarding her
brother’s case and got no response.
That same day, Sarena filed an Access to Information and Privacy request with the Department of
Foreign Affairs and the RCMP, thus pressuring them to provide more information about the
investigation.
A week later, she was informed by Australian consular officials that there was indeed surveillance
video from the airport on the day that Nara died but that the government of Laos refused
to share the entire video with anyone.
Sarena immediately requested assistance from the Canadian consulate in Thailand to try
and get the full video released.
“we’ve seen video footage.
He was definitely very, very agitated and then it seemed to escalate from there.
I wish I could tell you, but we just don’t know what happened at the end.”
The Autopsy
It transpired that Nara’s autopsy report had not included the autopsy photos nor the
toxicology report, and so that was requested from the hospital in Thailand that undertook
the autopsy.
Canadian consular officials in Thailand had to get involved to ensure the release of the
autopsy photos.
Even then, it took nearly three weeks before Sarena received both the autopsy photos and
toxicology report.
Five days later, Joe Slemko, a blood spatter expert, analyzed the photos from the scene
of Nara’s death.
His report was damning and conclusive: ‘There was no way that Nara had committed suicide.’
It Just Doesn’t Add Up
There has always been disbelief by the family who knew and loved Sihaknara Pech, a cheerful
young man who loved his family dearly and who went by the name Nara to friends and family.
They simply cannot believe that Nara killed himself in such a way.
The autopsy itself is a smoking gun that seriously undermines the police claim that Nara committed
suicide.
The autopsy, done by a pathologist at the Ramathibodi Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand,
has revealed that Nara was stabbed repeatedly in the chest.
That’s entirely different to the alleged three stab wounds that the Laotian police
stated he inflicted upon himself.
Nara also had multiple wounds to his neck, including the jugular, and what appeared to
be numerous defensive wounds to his arms, hands, legs, and knees.
Once again, that undermines the police claim of just three self-inflicted stab wounds.
The many questions that arise from this information are: Who exactly commits suicide in that way?
Why four knives at the scene?
Why all the blood if it was only a suicide, as the police claim and insist it was?
And who commits suicide so graphically in the middle of a restaurant in an international
airport?
The other smoking gun in this case was undoubtedly those final voice messages Nara left his family
and friend on January 21st, 2015.
His sister, Sarena, would say, "You can hear that he's afraid and he's pretty much begging
for help”.
She continued, “All he was trying to do was come home.”
Sarena and other family members would also add that Nara had no reason to commit suicide.
It was a happy phase of his life.
He had just recently graduated with honors and was to be married the following year.
They contend, He had no reason to kill himself.
Nara’s fiancée, Maureen Chear, is certainly of that opinion too.
she said in an interview with Canadian current affairs program, 16x9: “There’s no way…
It makes no sense to me,”
Nara’s sister is adamant when she emphatically says: “I believe he was murdered”.
She also believes that he was murdered by more than one person.
What Did Nara Mean?
The three voice messages left by Nara to his family and friend were all highly disturbing
but perhaps one of the most disturbing parts of the messages was when he said:
“I’m stuck here, they’ve blocked my wifi.
They took my boarding pass away.
Everybody is trying to get me to leave the airport, so they can kill me.
It’s a bad situation, I just need somebody to know”
Another important clue about what might have happened to Nara is that one message he mentioned
that authorities had accused him of saying something bad about the Cambodian Prime Minister,
Hun Sen.
It was then that he added that the situation was getting bad.
Was it indeed security forces who took his boarding pass away?
And if so, why?
Were any other people involved, since Nara claimed that ‘everyone was in on it’?
What about the supposed accusation against him regarding his statements about Hun Sen?
Would that have made a difference in Laos?
And what bearing did that possibly have on his eventual death a few hours later?
The Mystery Continues
Nara Pech's family remains highly dissatisfied by the way the situation has been handled by
the Canadian government to date, not to mention the actions - or mostly lack of action - by
the police and government authorities in Laos.
His sister Sarena has made it very clear: “We want answers.
We want action.
We want to know what happened”.
To this day, the family still hasn't seen surveillance from the airport that tragic
day.
They still don’t know what exactly happened to him in the early hours of January 22nd,
2015.
For now, the case remains closed in Laos.
The official version remains that Nara’s death was a suicide.
It doesn’t seem to be an open case from Canada’s perspective either.
A recent statement from the Canadian Ministry of State, Foreign Affairs and Consular stated:
“Our thoughts are with the family and friends of a Canadian citizen who passed away in Laos”.
This statement seems to suggests a case that is officially closed.
Those must seem to be very hollow sentiments for the family and friends of Nara Pech.
The case may remain closed according to the police in Laos, but for the family, there
are far too many unanswered questions, as detailed in this video.
What do you think happened to Nara?
Do you believe he committed suicide as the official story suggests?
Or do you think that there was possible foul play?
Could Nara’s paranoia have been the result of a psychotic break?
Or did he really have something to worry about.
Whatever your opinion, for now the case of Nara Pech’s death remains a mystery.