Lao authorities have charged one person, the owner of a distillery, over the methanol poisoning that killed Melbourne teenagers Bianca Jones and Holly Bowles and four other tourists in Vang Vieng in November 2024. The charges announced in Vientiane on Friday, selling food products harmful to health and operating an illegal business, carry between three months and four years in jail. Nobody has been charged over the deaths themselves.
Canberra's reaction came within hours. Foreign Minister Penny Wong said the government was "deeply frustrated and bitterly disappointed that authorities in Laos are not pursuing the most serious charges", the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade's acting secretary called in Laos' ambassador on Friday morning, and special envoy Pablo Kang was asked to fly to Vientiane the same day. Wong said she would raise the case with her Lao counterpart at the ASEAN foreign ministers' meeting in Manila.
The announcement itself was closed to scrutiny. International media were barred from the Vientiane press conference, and it fell to Denmark's foreign ministry, whose officials attended alongside Australian and British representatives, to confirm what the charges were. Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said he was deeply disappointed the indictment did not reflect the seriousness of the tragedy, AP reported.
The families had been braced for less. Before the announcement they were briefed to expect charges carrying up to a year in jail and a fine of about $1,600 against those who allegedly supplied the tainted alcohol. "All up, our daughter, along with four other beautiful women, their lives are worth less than a year and about $1,600. We're disgusted and angry," Bianca's father Mark Jones told SBS before the charges were confirmed. The laid charges reach further, to four years, but still touch only the distillery, not the deaths.
“We have consistently made clear our expectations that charges should reflect the gravity of the tragedy," Wong said. "What happened to Holly, Bianca and four other foreign nationals should never have happened.”
Jones and Bowles, both 19, died in Thai hospitals after drinking at the Nana Backpacker Hostel. British lawyer Simone White, 28, American James Louis Hutson, 57, and Danish travellers Anne-Sofie Orkild Coyman, 20, and Freja Vennervald Sorensen, 21, also died. The only convictions so far came in January, when a Lao court found ten people connected to the hostel guilty of destroying evidence, imposing suspended sentences and fines of about US$185 each.
Lao authorities say the case formally remains open for 15 years and that more serious charges, including negligent homicide, could follow if further evidence emerges. Australia's travel advice for Laos tells visitors to exercise a high degree of caution, citing crime, the risk of methanol poisoning and concerns about transparency in the justice system, AAP reported on Saturday.
Kang is now in place to press that evidence question directly, and Wong's Manila meeting gives the government its next formal avenue. Twenty months after six people died from drinks served at a backpacker hostel, the sum of legal consequence in Laos is ten suspended sentences, about US$1,850 in fines and one charge sheet that ends at four years.
