Is Thailand Safe For Tourists? Belgian Backpacker's Death On Mysterious Koh Tao Island To Be Re-Investigated

Thailand police officials are reinvestigating the case of a young Belgian backpacker, Elise Dallemange, who became the seventh tourist to be found dead on Thailand’s Koh Tao Island in the last three years, reports said Thursday.

The 30-year-old Dallemange was found in the jungle of the island on April 28 and was “partially eaten by animals, wrapped in T-shirts,” according to local reports. Police, however, said the girl died by suicide life by hanging herself.

The island of Koh Tao, popularly known as Turtle Island, has been a major attraction for tourists because of the Sairee beach located on its west coast. The beach is also famous for scuba diving.

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According to one of the local reports, there have been “enough deaths and suspicious disappearances to warrant the island its own CSI franchise.” Another local newspaper, the Samui Times, reported Koh Tao has been dubbed “Death Island” due to the rising number of tourist deaths on the island.

In the recent incident of the Belgian backpacker’s body being found on Koh Tao Island, the victim's mother, Michele van Egten on Wednesday expressed her disbelief in the police accounts. She believed the police were trying to cover up for the mysterious deaths on the island. "I do not believe what the police have told us. We fear somebody else was involved. We’re more and more thinking that the police information is not the right explanation," Michele told the Fox News.

Reports claimed that Michele disclosed her daughter was traveling around Asia for the last two years. Before her death in April, she stayed at a yoga and tantra retreat on the Koh Phangan Island. She made an unexpected stop at Koh Tao Island before leaving for Belgium, her hometown, on a ferry on April 19. However, she was found dead on April 28 in a jungle on the island. The victim's phone records also indicated that she had called her mother on April 17 before leaving for the Koh Phangan island. However, it was unclear why she chose to take a halt on the Koh Tao Island instead of continuing on to the mainland.

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In the last few years, a series of unexplained events have raised concerns about this island paradise and some people also refer to it as a “tourist trap.” Some also speculated that a serial killer is on the loose on this island as there have been instances of bodies floating in its waters from time to time.

“Koh Tao can be paradise but it can also be extremely dangerous for the unwary,” Australian lawyer Ian Yarwood said, according to Samui Times. “Potential tourists to that island need to be warned and not given a sense of false security,” he added.

According to several reports, the island was reportedly controlled by ruling families or the mafia, when the residents would “very occasionally... disappear.” “The mafia here isn't the sort who carry guns in violin cases or knock on doors extorting people. They’re the families that go back for generations, and who ran the islands before the police even got here,” a resident of the island had told the Guardian in an article published in 2014.

Koh Tao came under media attention in 2014 when semi-naked bodies of two British backpackers Hannah Witheridge, 23, and David Miller, 24, were discovered on a beach on the island. In 2016, a Russian tourist named Valentina Novozhyonova went missing from her hostel on the island and is not found till date. There was another instance of a Briton named Christina Annesley, who died on the island in 2015 after she had consumed a mixture of antibiotics with alcohol. However, her parents accused Thai police of not investigating their daughter’s death properly.