A major manhunt is under way in Thailand for a former senior police officer who allegedly killed a drugs suspect in custody while trying to extort money from him.
Warrants were issued for the arrest of seven officers for murder after a video emerged of a man suffocating after plastic bags were put over his head.
The group were trying to extort two million Thai baht (£44,399) from the man.
A Royal Thai Police spokesman said five of the group allegedly involved have been arrested but two were still on the run following the incident on 5 August at their police station in the province of Nakhon Sawan, north of Bangkok.
They include Police Colonel Thitisan Utthanaphon, nicknamed “Jo Ferrari” due to his collection of sports cars. He was sacked as Muang police station chief when the allegations came to light.
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A leaked CCTV video clip of the incident sparked public outrage after it was shared on the Facebook page of a lawyer earlier this week. Sittra Biabangkerd said he was given it by an officer at the police station.
It shows the male suspect in handcuffs being led into a room, his head covered with a plastic bag. He is then assaulted and thrown to the floor by officers who put more bags on his head.
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One of them appears to briefly kneel on him.
The man, identified by Thai media as 24-year-old Jeerapong Thanapat, then goes limp. Police try to revive him with a jug of water and CPR.
Another lawyer, Decha Kittiwittayanan, published an account of the alleged murder on his Facebook account after reportedly receiving a complaint from a junior police officer.
It is alleged the officers first tried to extort one million baht (£22,199) from him to pay for his release before doubling the demand on the orders of Pol Col Utthanaphon.
Following the suspect’s death it is claimed he then ordered his men to take the body to a hospital and say the man had died from a suspected methamphetamine overdose.
The junior officer said a woman arrested at the same time was released.
Sawanpracharak Hospital issued a statement confirming it received the body on 5 August and was told the man collapsed and died running away from police. An internal review is under way.
Meanwhile, a dedicated team of detectives have been appointed to investigate the case against the officers.
Police said they were working “round the clock” to arrest the two suspects still at large.
“The chief of police has instructed immigration police, border police and all units to stay on alert in order to arrest the remaining police officers and bring them to justice,” Police Colonel Kissana Phathanacharoen told Sky News.
As part of the investigation police found 29 cars registered to Pol Col Utthanaphon including supercars from Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini and Bentley, according to Thai media.
Campaigners are now demanding a full and transparent inquiry into police misconduct in Thailand.
“A prosecution fully independent of the Thai police is needed if there is any hope of justice in the torture and killing of Jeerapong Thanapat,” said Brad Adams, the Asia Director at Human Rights Watch.
“Successive Thai governments have a long history of failing to ensure accountability for even the most ghastly police abuses against people in custody.”
The police spokesman agreed the case was not “a good image for the Royal Thai police as a whole”, but added justice would be served.
“There are a lot of good cops out there, but if there is one bad cop we have to deal with them. We have to take serious, disciplined action and also criminal actions against them. So we’ve got to separate the bad and the good,” Pol Col Phathanacharoen said.
But that $1trn figure (or £761,910,000,000) – which is both one thousand billion and one million million – is almost impossible to imagine for most people.
Even so, we have drilled down into the numbers and examined what you can do with a trillion US dollars – and it turns out, quite a lot.
Show me the money
Laid end to end, a trillion one-dollar bills would cover a distance of approximately 156 billion metres.
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That could wrap around the equator 3,890 times, easily reach the sun from Earth (around 149.6 million km) or loop from Earth to the moon 405 times.
That many one-dollar notes could cover a massive area (roughly 10,339 km squared), meaning you could blanket nearly all of Lebanon or Jamaica in bills.
Spend it on sport
You could splash out on virtually all of the world’s major sporting leagues.
The clubs which make up the Premier League are relatively cheap ($30bn), and even when snapping up the UEFA Champions League clubs and the big five top divisions of Spain, Italy, Germany, and France, there’s still $858bn left in the kitty.
The four major US sports leagues for ice hockey, baseball, basketball, and American football (NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL) have a rough valuation of $544bn, according to Sportico.
But then add the IPL cricket league ($120bn) and F1 ($23.1bn) and Musk still has change from an estimated total spend of $829.7bn.
Image: Elon Musk is in the money if he hits targets set by Tesla’s shareholders. File pic: AP
Take over Tesla’s rivals
He could buy up the top 15 largest publicly traded automakers (excluding Tesla) by market capitalisation.
They would include firms like Japan’s Toyota ($275bn), Chinese automaker BYD ($120bn), and luxury brands like Ferrari ($81bn) and Mercedes-Benz ($62bn), as well as BMW ($52bn), Volkswagen ($50bn) and Ford ($48bn).
But there would still be a little change left over; the total bill would be an eye-watering $992bn.
Buy up San Diego
He could buy up every single residential property in San Diego County – valued at a total of $1trn. Seattle is just slightly out of reach at $1.1trn, according to recent data from real estate firm Zillow.
But if he wanted to buy big – there is always Tennessee. The total value of homes in the US state is estimated at $957bn. Or there is Maryland, which at $1.01trn could be bought if he can find a little more cash behind the sofa.
Sadly, he would struggle to scoop up London’s entire housing stock, which in February was valued at just under £2trn ($2.53trn), according to agents Savills.
Cities like New York ($4.6trn) and Los Angeles ($3.9trn) are also not within his budget, hosting America’s most expensive residential markets.
Do something charitable?
There is always the possibility Musk could follow in the footsteps of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who intends to give away 99% of his vast fortune over the next 20 years.
He could give every single man, woman, and child in the US a share of his cash pile. They would receive approximately $2,917.32 (£2,223.29), based on a population estimate of 342.7 million.
Although it would be roughly $14,348.79 (£10,935.20) for every person (roughly 69.6 million) in the UK.
If he wanted to give the entire globe an early Christmas present, then based on the rough world population estimate of 8.2 billion, everyone would receive $121.80 (£92.87).
Pay off the credit card
With $1trn, he could instantly rewrite history and erase debt interest payments and the government debt from dozens of the world’s sovereign nations.
Or Musk could wipe out the debts of Singapore ($1trn) or South Korea ($0.99trn) in one go, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund’s latest World Economic Outlook (Oct 2025).
But when it comes to the biggest debt-laden countries, $1trn would not even touch the sides.
The US has $38.3trn of government debt (just over one third of the total global debt pile) while the UK has a modest $4.1trn.
Prince Harry has apologised to Canada for wearing a Los Angeles Dodgers cap while attending a World Series game against the Toronto Blue Jays.
The Duke of Sussex and his wife, Meghan, were pictured at the baseball game last Tuesday, which Toronto ultimately lost to the Dodgers in a seventh-game decider on Sunday.
The prince joked to Canadian broadcaster CTV that he wore the Dodgers merchandise “under duress”.
He said it felt like “the polite thing to do” after being invited to the dugout by the team’s owner.
“Firstly, I would like to apologise to Canada for wearing it,” he said.
“Secondly, I was under duress. There wasn’t much choice.”
“When you’re missing a lot of hair on top, and you’re sitting under floodlights, you’ll take any hat that’s available,” he joked.
“Game five, game six, game seven, I was Blue Jays throughout. Now that I’ve admitted that, it’s going to be pretty hard for me to return back to Los Angeles.”
The royal couple, who met in 2016 and married in 2018, moved to California in 2020 – after initially setting up home in Canada. They live in Montecito with their children Archie, six, and Lilibet, four.
Harry’s father, the King, is the head of state of Canada – a Commonwealth nation.
Meghan has previously shown her support for the Blue Jays, a nod to her former home city.
The former actress lived in Toronto while filming the legal drama Suits. She appeared in more than 100 episodes.
She and Harry also spent time together there during the early stages of their relationship.
James Watson, co-discoverer of the double-helix shape of DNA, has died at the age of 97.
James D. Watson shared a 1962 Nobel Prize with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for discovering that deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.
Their co-discovery of the twisted-ladder structure of DNA in 1953 helped revolutionise medicine, crime-fighting, genealogy and ethics.
The discovery turned him into a legendary figure, but later in life he faced condemnation for offensive remarks, including saying black people are less intelligent than white people.
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly.