A Thai activist who claims to have been sent nude pictures of the King’s mistress has shared some of the photos with MailOnline.
News of the 1,400 leaked images made headlines this week as the explicit pictures laid bare infighting between King Vajiralongkorn’s wife, Queen Suditha, and his harem of mistresses.
Photos sent to this publication are said to show the billionaire monarch’s ‘royal noble consort’ Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi, who has returned to the royal fold after she was dramatically expelled and jailed last year.
Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a prominent royal critic based in Japan, told MailOnline he was anonymously sent the images on an SD card in August along with a letter claiming they were hacked from Sineenat’s phone while she was in prison.
Suspecting they were sent by Sineenat’s rivals, possibly allies of the King’s official wife Queen Suthida trying to ‘sabotage’ her return to the royal court, Pavin says he has shared some of the photos in order to ‘show the other side of the monarchy’.
Some of the images purport to show the consort completely nude, but Pavin has chosen not to publish these photos. Several of the photos show her baring her unshaven armpits – though it is not clear why.
The same photos, apparently taken between 2012 and 2014, were also sent to other royal critics outside Thailand.
Images leaked online purport to show selfies taken by Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi, the consort of the Thai king, as part of a trove of more than 1,000 photos sent to royal critics
Most of the images anonymously sent to critics of the Thai monarchy were selfies, some of them purportedly taken in Sineenat’s bathroom or car
Pavin said he received the anonymous envelope in late August, postmarked in France and containing an SD card on which the photos were stored.
Almost all of the photos were selfies, he said, some of them taken in a bathroom or in her car – with some of them showing the subject ‘completely naked’ and showing ‘every single thing that you could imagine’.
Among the pictures which have made their way onto the web are dozens which purport to be the 35-year-old posing with her armpits bared to the camera.
In others, the lens is directed from an acute angle to present a view of the woman’s cleavage, while her nipples are covered by carefully placed emojis.
In an unsigned letter to Pavin, the sender described the photos as top-secret files hacked from Sineenat’s phone after it was confiscated following her arrest in October 2019 and expulsion by King Maha Vajiralongkorn.
Pavin suggested that the purported hacker might have ‘waited for the moment to leak it’, saying it was ‘quite timely’ that they arrived in August just as Sineenat was being freed and rehabilitated.
‘It’s hard to believe it’s a coincidence,’ Pavin said, suggesting that the leak might have come from the Queen’s entourage.
The cache of photos, apparently taken between 2012 and 2014, was purportedly extracted from the royal consort’s phone while she was in prison
An exiled royal critic said he was anonymously sent these pictures, and others which are far more explicit, on an SD card in August this year
Accusations of trying to undermine the Queen were the cause of Sineenat’s downfall last year when she was stripped of all her titles and imprisoned.
Pavin said the letter indicated there were more such files in existence, with the sender not requesting any money but asking only that they not be identified. But ‘I don’t know who’s asking,’ Pavin said.
Pavin and UK-based journalist Andrew MacGregor Marshall, who also received the photos, were both named as personae non gratae by the Thai government in 2017, which Pavin believes was the reason that the senders sought him out.
The self-exiled Pavin said he did not plan to publish any of the explicit photos, but was sharing some of the others in order to ‘deconstruct the image of the monarchy’.
‘For a long time the monarchy has lived on [its] good image as part of propaganda, this shows the other side of the monarchy,’ he said.
MacGregor Marshall, who as not published any of the 1,443 images he said he received, said in a social media post that they showed an ‘ugly power struggle’ in the Thai monarchy.
‘It seems probable that she had taken these explicit photographs of herself to send to Vajiralongkorn… and that the images of Koi [Ms Sineenat’s nickname] were leaked in an effort to sabotage her return as Vajiralongkorn’s consort,’ he said.
He added that the letter sent to him had a fake return address which really belonged to an intelligence agency in Germany, where the King spends much of his time.
Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn poses with royal noble consort Sineenat Bilaskalayani, also known as Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi, in his Royal Office on August 26, 2019
Experience: Sineenat had trained as a pilot in Thailand and abroad, served in the King’s royal bodyguard unit, and in 2019 was awarded the rank of a major-general
Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn talks to Princess Bajrakitiyabha Mahidol (second left) as they sit with Queen Suthida (right) and royal noble consort Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi (left) in a golf buggy in Bangkok earlier this month
Sineenat, a former royal bodyguard, was gifted the title of royal consort to mark the king’s 67th birthday last July.
It was the first time in nearly a century that a Thai monarch had taken a consort, after the king married his fourth wife Queen Suthida earlier in 2019.
Both Queen Suthida, 42, and Ms Sineenat have served as senior officers in palace security units.
But last October, less than three months after making Sineenat his royal consort, the King issued a command rescinding the appointment.
In a statement, he accused her of misbehaving by actively seeking to block Suthida’s appointment as queen in order to take the position herself, and saying that when she failed to block Suthida, her ‘ambitions and aspirations’ led her to continue to seek ways to promote herself.
Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn and Queen Suthida during their wedding ceremony in Bangkok in May last year. According to tradition, the King has a semi-divine status and must be seated higher than those around him
Thailand’s Royal Noble Consort Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi attends a candlelight vigil to remember the birthday of Thailand’s late King Bhumibol Adulyadej, outside the Grand Palace in Bangkok, Thailand, December 5, 2020
Then in August this year the Royal Gazette reported reported that Sineenat was not tainted by any wrongdoing, and the record should not show that she ever lost her privileges.
It came in a tense political period in which Thailand has seen an unprecedented number of demonstrations demanding reform of the monarchy.
Sineenat has been seen as a ‘PR tool’ for the King to regain popularity recently and often meets royalist supporters alone.
Her fall had been particularly stunning because only two months earlier, a palace website released scores of photos of her and the king, some in formal settings and others in markedly casual poses, such as taking part in flying, shooting and skydiving.
Others showed her and the king holding hands, unusually intimate photos for members of the royal family.
Suthida was previously a flight attendant with Thai Airways, while Sineenat was an army nurse.
The 68-year-old king has seven children by three previous marriages, all of which ended in divorce.
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