Looting at Thai Crash Scene Denounced : Disaster: Villagers may have complicated search for clues to cause of loss of Austrian airliner.

Investigators said Wednesday that their efforts to find the cause of the fiery crash of an Austrian airliner may have been complicated by the thousands of villagers who looted the remains of the plane’s 223 passengers and crew.

Thai newspapers expressed national shame at the ghoulish spectacle of thousands of people flocking to the crash site, tearing open suitcases, stealing wristwatches off corpses and helping themselves to singed wallets and travelers checks. Police made no effort to stop the looting on the first day after Sunday night’s crash.

Because of a national and international outcry, 1,000 police officers ringed the crash site Wednesday and turned back curious passersby. But officials said considerable evidence had simply vanished.

The investigation is already hampered by the remote locale of the crash, they added.

They reported no new leads on the cause of the crash, but Niki Lauda, the majority shareholder of Lauda Air, the airline that owned the plane, said police told him they had identified a drug dealer aboard the flight and had been waiting to arrest him in Vienna.

“I was shaken by the conditions there,” Lauda said after inspecting the wreckage. “Neither the police nor the military have sealed off the area. Hundreds of Thais who have nothing to do with the rescue work are marching through, some just curious, others stealing everything that is not nailed down.”

The Lauda Air Boeing 767-300 crashed late Sunday night in Suphan Buri, a provincial town about 120 miles northwest of Bangkok near the border with Myanmar. The plane had been on a flight from Hong Kong to Vienna, with a stopover in Bangkok.

Western security experts have said that based on the disintegration of the aircraft and the speed with which it went down, they are virtually certain that a bomb was detonated on board. Wreckage was scattered over a six-mile area. The pilot never reported any problems on the plane, which disappeared less than 16 minutes into its scheduled flight.

Police Capt. Suthassanaphan Kachornboon, a member of the Thai investigating team at the crash site, told reporters that the first police to arrive at the scene found 200 villagers already picking their way through the burning debris. Thousands more scavengers flocked to the area.

“We have lost a lot of clues,” he acknowledged.

Authorities reported Wednesday that they had recovered all of the bodies and the two “black box” recorders, which should provide key evidence on what happened just before the crash. But the opening of suitcases and moving of bodies could obscure the exact location of the explosion in the airplane, security officials said.

Officials also criticized rescue workers for the clumsy way they tore through the wreckage, because seat locations might have helped identify some of the bodies. But the strongest criticism was reserved for the looters.

“While they continue their ghoulish looting spree amidst the smoldering wreckage, we cannot help but hang our heads in shame and despair,” declared the English-language newspaper Nation.

“Shame, because our society, which follows the teaching of the Lord Buddha, has reduced itself to a mere parasitic mode of existence with materialism overwhelming everything else--even human lives--and despair because the authorities never made any effort, as usual, to cordon off the crash site from these rapacious and callous (vultures).”

Lauda, who returned to Vienna on Wednesday, was quoted as saying that Austrian police had informed him that Lauda Air flights were frequently used by drug couriers.

He said he could not confirm speculation that heroin was found at the crash site.