Thailand's Princess Bajrakitiyabha dies at 47 after three years in coma

Thailand's Princess Bajrakitiyabha has died at age 47 after more than three years in a coma, the royal household announced.

She collapsed in December 2022 while exercising her dogs. Doctors said the cause was a severely irregular heartbeat brought on by a mycoplasma infection in her heart.

The palace said in a statement Friday morning that the medical team gave her the closest and most intensive care possible, but her condition continued to decline. She died at 19:48 local time the previous day at Chulalongkorn Hospital.

Princess Bajrakitiyabha trained as a lawyer and earned two postgraduate degrees from Cornell University in the United States. She worked briefly at the Thai mission to the United Nations in New York before returning to Thailand to serve in the Attorney-General's offices in Bangkok and other parts of the country.

From 2012 to 2014 she was Thailand's ambassador to Austria and developed ties with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. She later became the UNODC's Ambassador for the Rule of Law in South East Asia and spoke publicly about the need for penal reform, especially for women prisoners. Thailand has one of the world's highest numbers of female inmates, and she focused on cases where people received long sentences for minor drug offenses.

Her legal work and the trust her father placed in her made her a frequent subject of speculation about the royal succession. King Vajiralongkorn, 73, has not named an heir. Thai custom favors a male successor, though a 1974 constitutional amendment permits a woman to take the throne.

The king has five sons. Four from his second marriage were disowned in 1996 and live with their mother in the United States. His fifth son, Dipangkorn, from his third marriage, is seen as the presumed heir, though questions have been raised about his capacity to serve as monarch.