Overnight into 1 August, near Pattaya, at Khao Chi Chan hill in the Huai Yai area of Chonburi province, two pits were opened. One held Roman and Diana Nazimov, a brother and sister from Russia: he was seventeen, she was twenty-two. The second, on the other side of the motorway, held a Thai family of three: Wichian Wongsa, Chantana Chat-in and their eighteen-year-old daughter Nichapha. Five people in all.
We transcribed the Thai live broadcast all that night and on until 6 August. What follows is what came out of it: not a retelling of the horror, but an attempt to show where the line runs between what has been established, what has been claimed and what has been made up. In cases like this, that line is the first thing to blur, and it has to be redrawn by hand.
One caveat, and it holds until the end of this text. Thana Kerdthong (known as Pong) and Thongchai Srinil (known as Thong) are on trial. In October both pleaded guilty in a Pattaya court to all the charges, in the Nazimov case and in the Thai family’s case alike, but there is no verdict yet: with charges like these, the court hears the evidence first. So everything below that comes with “according to investigators” or “according to the suspects” remains a version of events, not a fact established by a court. And it is not there out of courtesy.
The main thing to take away
According to investigators, Roman and Diana did not resist at first and got onto the strangers’ motorbikes of their own accord: the attackers introduced themselves as police officers. A few weeks earlier the Thai family had been taken the same way: someone knocked at the door, handcuffed the husband and wife, and waited for their daughter to come back from the shop. A black jacket and a card that looked like an ID were enough.
The indictment on which the case went to court includes a separate count of usurping the authority of a public official. This detail is not there for colour: it is exactly what explains why five people, at different times and in different places, did not resist at first.
Six days
Roman and Diana left home in the early hours of 26 July and did not come back. In the first days it was reported that they had gone to watch the sunrise; where they were really going, and why, is still unknown. The signal from their phones cut out at around four in the morning on the motorway, and that is where the search began.
For two days, while the case was already in the news, the suspects calmly rode around the area and did not hide. They bolted on the third day. Provincial Police Region 2 went through camera footage, reconstructed their escape route and on 31 July, the sixth day after Roman and Diana disappeared, arrested both in an ambush in Wang Sombun district, Sa Kaeo province, near the Cambodian border: according to investigators, they were heading across the border.
By evening both had confessed, and they were driven back to Chonburi to point out the spot. That car’s journey became the backbone of an eight-hour live broadcast that, at its peak, around sixty thousand people were watching.
The place
The bodies were buried in woodland on a hillside by the road towards Rayong, three to four kilometres from the point where the signal was lost.
The place was not chosen at random, and this is the most telling detail of the whole case. One of the suspects used to make charcoal here, so he knew this patch of land. For anyone else it is almost impossible to reach: a narrow strip of land between hills, the only way in through a tunnel under the motorway, no mobile signal. How hard it is to get there became clear when medics were called: two doctors had to ride in on a dirt bike.
The spot was changed four or five times over the day, because the suspects kept getting confused. At six in the evening a patch by a tamarind tree was cordoned off; the real pit turned out to be under a mango tree. In the end it was found because the rains of the past few days had made the soil sink, and the patch stood out from the ground around it.
Digging began at 21:51, and the police made the suspects themselves dig. At 22:26 it was confirmed: there were two people in the pit, a man and a woman.
Across the motorway
The second pit turned up where nobody had been looking, in a coconut grove on the other side of the motorway. Thai media give different distances between the two: Thairath says 300–400 metres, Thai PBS about two kilometres. While Roman and Diana’s bodies were still being taken out, the police were already on their way to dig for the father, mother and daughter.
And here begins the part that is the whole reason this piece was written.
The Thai family had gone missing a few weeks earlier. According to the suspects’ confessions, they were killed on 6 July; early reports said the end of June. Their relatives reported them missing on 7 July. According to a relative who came on air that night, no one contacted them after that, not once. When she called herself, she was told they had been out there and found nothing, even though nobody had called the relatives or asked where exactly the family lived. Instead of an investigation, they were offered the theory that her sister had run off with a lover.
The relatives searched on their own: they walked the plot looking for freshly turned earth, and every two or three days came back to feed the dogs left in the yard.
Her sister’s husband’s number stayed active. When she got through, an unfamiliar woman picked up and complained that someone kept calling her, and when his wife was mentioned, turned away and asked someone next to her: “Didn’t you say you had no wife?” Then the call was cut off. The relatives asked the police to trace the signal. They called the mobile operator themselves and were told that only the police could make such a request.
She learned that her family was dead from that same broadcast. For several days she had been following the case of the missing Russians without knowing it concerned her family too, and understood only when she heard about “three more bodies”.
Her words on air are worth quoting in full: “Or it’s that we’re Thai, we’re poor and we have no money.” Outside a 7-Eleven she had seen missing-person notices for the Russians and found nothing about her own family.
This is not about one family being searched for harder than another out of malice. It is about how attention works: a high-profile case involving foreigners mobilised police from two regions, a live broadcast and some fifty volunteers, while the report about the missing Thai family, according to the relatives, sat untouched for a month at the same Huai Yai police station. They were found only because they turned out to be buried nearby.
What the suspects say and where investigators don’t believe them
The motive, they say, was a motorbike. They did not know the victims.
From there the accounts diverged exactly where responsibility begins. Thong said he had been forced at gunpoint, that he did the digging and Pong did the shooting. Pong said he had not intended to kill the Nazimovs. In the second case, by his own account, he shot the mother himself, while two other suspects shot the father and the daughter. In material that came out later, Pong also shifted the blame for Diana’s death onto Thong, although in his first statements he had admitted beating her himself. To the explanation “I was forced”, the investigator replied drily: there were ways not to take part. In the autumn, in court, the arguing stopped: Pong and Thong pleaded guilty to all the charges.
Investigators did not take their account on trust, and here are three places where it does not add up.
A gap in time. What happened after the phone signal was lost, where they were taken and whether they were held somewhere: there is no clear answer. Investigators call this the key inconsistency.
Testimony that fits too neatly. At first the two were questioned together and gave identical answers. That is exactly what made the investigators wary: the questioning was moved to separate rooms.
Were there only two? Investigators looked into whether someone else helped hide the bodies.
There is also a detail that sits badly with the theory of a random robbery. The attack happened between four and five in the morning. Ordinary people do not lie in wait for others at four in the morning: this points to preparation rather than chance.
The weightiest thing the police point to is camera footage: according to them, it shows both men near the victims in their last hours.
How the five-bodies theory was born and died in one night
What happened in the broadcast’s chat deserves a closer look, because exactly the same thing happens in any community chat when something big breaks.
At around a quarter past seven, a theory was aired: supposedly the suspects had also got rid of a family who happened to see what was going on, making five bodies in one pit. The reporter immediately added that he did not know whether it was true. An hour later the broadcast refuted it: the three were not witnesses; it was a separate case and a separate burial.
The theory spread within ten minutes, long before any explanation came, and kept going for another hour after it was refuted. The peak of activity, 846 messages in five minutes, came exactly when the broadcast was torn between “two” and “five”. By the end of the evening the chat was circulating “seven bodies” and “someone fished out of a river” as well, without a single confirmation.
A word, too, about the information vacuum. The Russian-speaking part of the chat, more than a thousand messages, spent several hours not knowing whether the bodies had been found: people were trying to translate the broadcast with a second phone. Volunteers saved the day, relaying what was happening in English and Russian in real time. That was probably the most humane thing on the internet that night.
What happened next
All four people involved were brought before the Pattaya court: Pong, Thong and two more suspects in the Thai family’s case, Chatchanan “Fluke” Paen-iam and Atsadang “Ball” Chuwong. Pong and Thong were denied bail on the grounds of the gravity of the alleged crimes and the risk that they would flee; both are in custody. The prime minister and the national police chief came to Chonburi in connection with the investigation.
A question came up as to why these two had been free at all. On 1 August the Department of Corrections answered. Pong had served his full sentence in Rayong prison, more than seven years for attempted murder, weapons and drugs offences, and was released on 5 June 2026 without any special privileges. A court had placed him under two years’ supervision under a 2022 law on preventing repeat offending: reporting once a quarter and going through rehabilitation. Thong had left Pattaya prison at the end of his sentence in September 2025, and the law did not apply to him.
On 6 August the main remaining question was settled: how many victims there were in total. Police used ground-penetrating radar to check seven points in a coconut grove; where the device gave a signal, they dug. No new bodies were found: according to the experts, the signals came from rocks and dense soil. The confirmed death toll remains five.
That same day a farewell was held at the site. Diana and Roman’s mother kissed photographs of her children; white flowers were brought to the pit, along with a glass of coffee. After the ceremony she thanked the Thai people, the services involved, the police and the volunteers, and said their kindness had given the family strength.
On 30 September prosecutors sent the Nazimov case to the Pattaya court: nine charges, among them murder and armed rape resulting in death. There had been no rape charge in the first police reports, and the victims’ mother, Zarina Nazimova, publicly asked what evidence it was based on. On 1 October Pong and Thong still denied murder; on 20 October they pleaded guilty to all the charges. The court admitted Zarina to the proceedings as a co-plaintiff on the rape and murder charges. In the Thai family’s case, all four accused pleaded guilty to all the charges on 26 October. There is no verdict in either case: the court will hear the evidence on 23 November in the Thai family’s case and on 30 November in the Nazimov case.
What is still unknown
According to the police, all three in the second grave were shot, but no forensic report has been published. It is not known what happened between the loss of the signal and the killing. Who did what is known only from testimony: in the summer Pong and Thong shifted the blame onto each other, and in the autumn, together with the two other accused, they pleaded guilty to everything, but the court has yet to test those pleas. The police have not publicly explained what became of the report about the missing Thai family, which, according to the relatives, sat untouched for a month.
And two contradictions that nobody cleared up that night. At 22:49 the police said both victims were clothed and the initial examination showed no signs of violence; at 00:20 the opposite was said. At 20:58 the police called a link between the second case and debt collection highly likely; at 23:30 the same police denied any debt, and the later testimony does not mention debt at all.
The full chronicle, 177 entries tagged “fact”, “theory”, “rumour” and “development”, with testimony, interviews with relatives and the whole broadcast, is in the transcript at translate.itparty.club (in Russian). It is updated there too.
The follow-up is a breakdown of the film “Mama, We’re in Paradise”: the last nineteen minutes before the motorway through the eyes of the family and volunteers, and the questions the official version has yet to answer.
If you know something about this case, don’t spread rumours, bring a source: that night the community chat (in Russian) showed how quickly unverified claims become common knowledge.
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