Warrant for SWAT impersonator

Robert McInnes

A Thai court will today issue police with a warrant to arrest a New Zealander for impersonating a SWAT officer in Pattaya.

Robert Malcolm McInnes was detained at the Thai tourist beach town last Thursday after a police swoop on a vehicle owned by McInnes in which live automatic weapons were found.

The swoop followed a tip-off that McInnes and his associates had been seen around central Pattaya fully armed and dressed in SWAT gear.

McInnes was found to be in possession of a small arsenal of firearms and ammunition and a yellow Hummer was found to be fitted with police sirens and adorned with Thai national police and SWAT logos.

His other four vehicles, all branded with Thai police logos and which stored various other weapons and ammunition, have also been taken by the police.

Thai police said yesterday they had found no record of a firearms permit being issued in his name.

McInnes produced various identification cards, including one that identifies him as Colonel Robert McInnes and another that said he was a SWAT officer with the police counter terrorism unit.

A New Zealand passport reproduced on the Pattaya Daily News website shows he was born in 1963 in Castor Bay. Although it was said in his passport that he was born in 1963, his other IDs listed his birth year as 1953.

A martial arts practitioner, McInnes founded and ran the Sir Gee Dorr Kung Fu Schools in New Zealand between 1980 and 1991, which claims to have trained more than 11,000 kung fu exponents.

He became a controversial figure when the methods used in his extreme Sir Gee Dorr martial arts training were exposed after the death of a student.

Students trained by McInnes had to shave their heads and swear allegiance to him. They also signed a form agreeing to submit to any form of discipline McInnes believed was fitting.

The style attracted controversy and huge attention after the death of student Jason Dooley, 17, in 1988.

Dooley - who couldn't swim - drowned when McInnes forced a group of trainees to swim the flooded waters of the Waiwera River. The teenager couldn't cope and was swept to his death.

It followed training sessions in which Dooley was forced to wade through deep water while McInnes fired bullets at him from a semi-automatic weapon.

Evidence was given at the inquest into Dooley's death that McInnes had fired shots as close as 40cm as an "adrenalin training" technique.

According to the Sir Gee Dorr website, McInnes went to Thailand in 1992 to teach fulltime at the Thai Military Academy and run the International School of Martial Arts.

The website says he is the grandmaster of Sir Gee Dorr Kung Fu - or Way of the Snake - a Shaolin-style martial arts form that he has trained in since he was 5.

Annual training and grading trips are organised for New Zealand students to go to McInnes' martial arts school in Thailand.

McInnes also runs his own property development business in Thailand under the ISS Business Group, which he founded.

Investigations have established he was not employed with the Pattaya police at present, although he had previously been engaged as the department's martial arts instructor.