CHUMPHON — A DJ and his production crew were sentenced to jail for fishing in a national park for a YouTube video, the group said on Wednesday.
In a YouTube video, Poomjai “DJ Poom” Tangsanga said he and five others were found guilty by the Chumphon Provincial Court on March 10 on the counts of authorized fishing and boating in Mu Koh Chumphon National Park back in August 2018.
The judge handed down a sentence of four years in prison and a fine of 40,000. The jail term was reduced to two years of suspended sentence because the defendants confessed. The fine was also halved to 20,000 baht.
“My feelings are like a rollercoaster. Nervous, scared, and finally disappointed,” DJ Poom said in a 20-minute video on his channel about the judgment day. “I’m not disappointed in the harsh sentence. We did wrong and we admit it.”
He added, “I wish [the judge] had seen that our intentions over the past hundreds of episodes we did were to conserve the environment.”
In 2018, DJ Poom posted a video of him and his crew fishing from a speedboat in the national park area, and cooking fish on it. A year later, park rangers filed complaints against the group, resulting in a criminal investigation.
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