Authorities today backed up police officers criticized for charging two Dutch citizens with carrying a switchblade in their vehicle.
In a scene captured on video Tuesday by a passenger, officers who’d stopped the car on the way to the airport in Bangkok ordered the driver out of the car to search the front storage console without clear cause.
The Thai woman, who was unidentified, said in Thai she and another foreigner in the front seat both had Dutch passports, and were on their way to catch a flight back to Netherlands.
When police found the knife, the woman said she had it in her car because she sometimes drives alone in Thailand and carries it for self-defence.
Pol. Lt. Chamlong Promkal of Bangkok’s Bangkhunon police department said today the officers normally set up checkpoints in their area and took the couple to the station to pay a fine because the knife was considered a weapon.
“I’d like to explain that people cannot just carry a knife in public. It’s illegal,” Chamlong told Daily News. “She could not claim she carried the knife for self-defence because there were three people in the car that night. If it was a woman traveling alone, we may have cut her some slack.”
In the end, their Thai driver let police confiscate the knife and take a photo of a driver’s license to pay the fine at the police station later so the couple could catch their flight.
Correction: Due to a translation error, a previous version of the story misidentified the weapon as a Swiss army knife. It was in fact a switchblade.
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