Thai woman has no anger toward Facebook after girl’s killing

PHUKET, Thailand — The wife of a Thai man who hanged their 11-month-old daughter on Facebook Live said Wednesday her husband is the only person to blame and she bears no anger toward the social media site or the users who shared the horrific video.

The video showed 20-year-old Wuttisan Wongtalay killing his child by hanging her at an abandoned hotel. The video was livestreamed Monday evening and made inaccessible by Facebook late Tuesday afternoon.

Police said the man later killed himself. The video was apparently available for viewing online for almost 24 hours until Facebook pulled it down.

“I am not angry at Facebook or blaming them on this,” Chiranut Trairat, 21, told The Associated Press. “I understand that people shared the video because they were outraged and saddened by what happened.”

She said her husband had been abusive in the past and spent two years in prison before they started dating.

Facebook has been seeking ways to block videos as quickly as possible after a series of gruesome images, including murder and sexual assault, were livestreamed or posted.

“This is an appalling incident and our hearts go out to the family of the victim. There is absolutely no place for content of this kind on Facebook and it has now been removed,” Facebook said in a statement on the Thai incident.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said last week that his company has “a lot of work” to do on the problem.

The murder in Phuket came less than two weeks after a man in Cleveland, Ohio, posted on Facebook a video of himself shooting a man to death.

In Thailand, the potential for problems with Facebook Live became an issue last May when local media used the platform to broadcast live video of a university lecturer who was locked in a six-hour standoff with police who were seeking him in the shooting deaths of two colleagues. After negotiations for his surrender failed, he fatally shot himself, a moment that was shown live.