The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Tuesday upheld the decision of the Spanish High Court to extradite a British citizen accused of murdering a woman in Thailand.
Strasbourg has thus responded to the complaint filed in October 2019 by Shane Kenneth Looker, who was arrested in Ibiza in June 2017 and wanted to prevent his extradition from Spain to the Southeast Asian country.
The court has upheld the National Court’s July 2018 ruling, which found that the guarantees offered by Thailand were sufficient to ensure that he would not be sentenced to capital punishment or subjected to inhumane treatment.
Accused of murder
According to the Strasbourg court in a statement, the report that Thai police sent to Madrid proves that the accused arrived in Bangkok on 31 October 2014 and that in the early hours of 2 November he murdered a 27-year-old Thai prostitute in her room . Officers allege that on November 27 of that same year he left the country and settled in Ibiza. A year later, the authorities demanded his extradition from Spain.
Shane Looker, a 47-year-old British man with an international arrest warrant, was arrested in Ibiza on 8 June 2017 as the alleged perpetrator of the gruesome death of a young Thai woman, who was found dismembered in a suitcase in November 2014. Since then, Looker’s whereabouts had been unknown, although the Guardia Civil had long been aware that he was living on the island, where he was reportedly a partner in a hotel.
In order to avoid extradition Looker lodged an appeal with the Spanish High Court and, following the decision of the Council of Ministers to send him to Thailand, he lodged an appeal for amparo with the Constitutional Court, which finally declared the appeal inadmissible.
The ECHR rejected his application “for failure to exhaust domestic remedies”, as it was established that he did not challenge the previous judicial decision. “The applicant knew that he could have lodged an appeal for amparo against the judicial decision of the Spanish High Court during the extradition process,” the Court said.