The Death of King Ananda Rama IX’s reign was haunted from the start. When he was 18 years old, his world was transformed by one shattering event, and the consequences and emotional cost and unanswered questions have pursued him through the decades, despite his repeated attempts to shake himself free.
On June 9, 1946, King Ananda Mahidol, Bhumibol’s elder brother, was shot through the head in his bedroom in the Barompiman Hall, a European-style mansion inside the Grand Palace complex.
The events of that morning are more than 65 years in the past now. Many Thais believe they should be left there, undisturbed, the questions they raise unanswered forever. That was my view too, when I started writing #thaistory. I wanted to concentrate on Thailand’s 21st century crisis, and it just seemed unnecessarily provocative and cruel to publish the real story of June 9, 1946. What good would it do now? It would just cause pain.
But I changed my mind. It became clear that to understand what is happening to Thailand now, at the end of Bhumibol’s reign, you need to know how his reign began, and the implications of what happened. The secret has been lurking like an unexploded bomb beneath the palace for six decades, and the actions of the king and of the royalist establishment can only be understood in this context.
There is no serious doubt that Bhumibol Adulyadej shot and killed his brother that morning. The king is only person left alive who knows for sure exactly what happened in the Barompiman Hall bedroom inside the Grand Palace where Ananda was killed, and he seems resolved to take his knowledge to the grave with him. But a wealth of contemporary documentary evidence, as well as Bhumibol’s actions and evasions in the aftermath of his brother’s death, and the absence of any other convincing explanation for what happened, add up to the overwhelming likelihood that Bhumibol was responsible. As Thammasat University professor Somsak Jeamteerasakul, the leading academic expert on the events surrounding Ananda’s death, has pointed out, deduction can go a long way, just as in crime novels like Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile:
There was a limited space, only a limited number of people were involved and some have not been straight with the truth – we can think it through and explain what happened.
It was almost certainly not premeditated, and probably an accident, and Bhumibol has never got over what happened.
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