At the Court of Appeal, Petr Donatek gave half-answers, claimed lapses of memory, and provided utterly implausible assertions. He gave no indication for the reasons that led him to organize the assault in Paris on November 17, 2019, of Aum Neko, a Thai political refugee known for her virulent stances against the monarchy and the government that emerged from a military coup in 2014.

On that evening in 2019, several Thai expatriates in France including political refugees, met at Zinc, a bar in the 15th district of Paris, to celebrate a birthday. As they left the bar, two men rushed them. Aum Neko was hit in the face and fell to the ground, where she was violently hit again. Another refugee, Nithiwat Wannasiri, was injured when he tried to intervene. The scene lasted just a few seconds. The two assailants fled the scene immediately.

That would probably have been the end of the matter if Aum Neko's friends had not pursued the assailants and called for help. A passing police patrol stopped the attackers, two Czech nationals, Daniel Vokal and Jakub Hosek.

The third man

The investigation later revealed a third man, Petr Donatek, a former Czech policeman who bought the group's plane tickets, paid for their expenses during their stay and, above all, allegedly filmed the attack from the bar opposite Zinc. Speaking to the investigators, Jakub Hosek even claimed that he had been promised 50,000 Czech Koruna (about €2,000) to commit the attack. He later retracted his statement.

The two perpetrators were sentenced to 26 months in prison on November 23, 2021. Petr Donatek did not travel to France, claiming to have contracted Covid-19 shortly before the hearing. In his absence, the Paris court had given him a 30-month prison sentence for planning the attack. He had appealed, from the Czech Republic, where he lived freely and continued his job as a martial arts teacher. But on July 13, 2022, while on vacation in Italy, he was arrested under a European arrest warrant and handed over to the French authorities three months later.

The hearing on February 1 could have lifted a portion of the veil on what seems to be the international hunt of Thai exiles critical of the monarchy. In recent years, several have disappeared while seeking refuge in Cambodia or attempting to reach Vietnam. In 2018, two anti-monarchy activists were found in Laos at the bottom of the Mekong River, with concrete in their stomachs. In July 2019, a dissident Thai academic, Pavin Chachavalpongpun, was sprayed with a chemical at his home in Kyoto, Japan. His attacker told a Japanese court he had been contracted, but he refused to give the name of the party behind the contract. He was sentenced, in June 2022, to 20 months in prison.

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