Man imprisoned for grisly 1996 Thai killing arrested in Winnipeg for bank robbery
WINNIPEG — A man previously convicted of killing his girlfriend in Thailand has been arrested in Manitoba on a Canada-wide warrant.
Michael Karas, 61, was wanted in three bank robberies in Toronto between November 2017 and August of this year. On Thursday, police arrested him at a Winnipeg hotel.
Karas previously was charged with the 1996 murder of a Thai woman whose body was found dismembered at a resort community in the south-Asian country.
Court documents from his extradition case in Canada show Karas was in a relationship with Suwannee Ratanaprakorn. They were living together at a hotel in Pattaya on the east coast of the Gulf of Thailand.
The documents say Karas allegedly cut the woman’s body into pieces before dumping it in a swampy area not far from the hotel. The woman’s head, arms and legs were recovered, but her torso was never found.
The records show he left Thailand almost immediately after the killing and returned to Canada, where he was arrested and held in custody on other charges.
Karas was flown back to Thailand in 2011 to face a trial after Thai authorities had called for his return for more than a decade.
During an interview with the Toronto Sun in 2016 while he was still behind bars in Thailand, Karas said he had been repatriated under a foreign inmate transfer and was coming back to Canada.
He said he was wrongfully convicted of murder because he thought he was pleading guilty to manslaughter.
“She came at me and I snapped her neck,” the Sun quoted him as saying.
There is no word on when he arrived back in Canada or when he was released.
https://lfpress.com/pmn/news-pmn/can...b-39bcaf39cb2c
