A LOCAL man stabbed dead his one-year-and-two-month-old daughter recently and then took his own life by slitting his throat with the same knife he used to kill the baby.

Pom told investigators that before her husband killed their daughter, they quarreled over his excessive gambling. She said she threatened to separate from her husband and go back to her hometown in Songkhla province with their daughter if he did not give up gambling.

Tinan, who was a polio victim, was said to be a well-known gambler on the island. Pom claimed that Tinan lost all their savings by betting them in buffalo fights and high-low games.

After their quarrel, Pom said she thought her husband “was in his normal self” and left him sitting under the house while “our baby was sleeping in the cradle.” She went upstairs, but not long after she heard his daughter cry loudly. She ran downstairs and saw her husband stabbing the face of their child with a kitchen knife.

Shocked, she asked him why he was doing it, but he remained silent and gave the knife to her, asking her to cut his throat. Pom refused and told her husband that he would pay for his crime.

She then rushed her seriously injured daughter to the hospital, but she was pronounced dead on arrival. In the hospital, Pom was informed that her husband had committed suicide.

Pom said she and Tinan had lived together for a long time before they had a child. Pom had previously worked as office cleaner; she quit her job to take care of their daughter. Pom claimed that her husband loved the baby very much. He did not want his daughter to have a poor life so he decided to kill her and take his own miserable life, she said.

Police said the killing of his daughter and his suicide resulted from stress as Tinan was afraid to be separated from his wife and daughter.