Australia summoned Laos’s ambassador to Canberra on Friday after saying it was “deeply frustrated and bitterly disappointed” that authorities in the Southeast Asian nation were not pursuing the most serious charges over the 2024 deaths of its citizens from contaminated alcohol.
Backpackers Holly Bowles and Bianca Jones, both 19, died after drinking contaminated liquor in the Lao town of Vang Vieng. The teenagers from Melbourne reportedly had “free shots” of what they thought was locally made vodka and soon fell sick. They were taken to a hospital in neighbouring Thailand, but succumbed.
An investigation subsequently found the liquor was contaminated with methanol, a toxic alcohol used as a industrial solvent, pesticide, and alternative fuel source.
The liquor, served at the Nana Backpackers Hostel, north of the Loa capital Vientiane, also killed an American man, a British woman, and two Danish women.
Australian foreign minister Penny Wong said that her government was “deeply frustrated and bitterly disappointed”.
“We’ve consistently made clear our expectations that charges should reflect the gravity of the tragedy that claimed the lives of Holly and Bianca in November 2024,” she Ms Wong said, adding that she would raise Australia’s concerns directly with her Lao counterpart at an Asean meeting in Manila next week.
The embassy of Laos in Canberra did not immediately comment on the summoning of the ambassador.
Authorities in Loas could charge the people allegedly responsible for the incident with two offences collectively carrying up to one year in jail and a fine, the ABC quoted unnamed sources as saying on Friday.
Relatives of the two Australian victims came down heavily on Lao authorities for not adequately charging the accused people.
Jones’s father, Mark Jones, said that, according to information received by the families, the punishment that the accused were expected to face if convicted was up to a year in prison and a modest fine.
He described such a resolution as “unacceptable”.
“It’s like their lives didn’t even matter,” Jones’s mother, Michelle Jones, said. “We’re just really appalled by it all. You know, they were just going over to have a bit of fun, and just doing the rite of passage that every, you know, child or teenager does. So for that outcome, it was just devastating.”
Shaun Bowles, the father of the second victim, described the anticipated legal development in Laos as “mind-boggling”. Not least because, he pointed out, Laos was “a popular tourist destination for a lot of travellers, a lot of young Australian travellers and young people from around the world”.
He said he expected potential visitors to Laos to reconsider going “because they’ve demonstrated the way that they act, and as I say, the value that they put on tourists’ lives over there and the way they’ve tried to cover this up”.
