THE OCTOBER Asean Plus Six summit is to be held in Cha-Am and Huan Hin, not Phuket, Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya announced today.

As Phuketwan predicted in a report headed 'Will Asean Plus Six Sacrifice Meat, Drink and Sex?', the Vegetarian Festival posed an unusual security issue that in the end was apparently considered too difficult to overcome.

Phuket travel and tourism industry leaders were confident the important 16-nation international summit would be coming to the island, as the 27-nation meeting of foreign ministers did in July.

However, Phuket's favoritism to win the gathering began to look less certain this week when the Prime Minister told the Govenor that Phuket was a ''70 percent chance'' to hold the Asean Plus Six summit.

That was the first clear-cut hint that something was amiss.

While US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was said to have enjoyed her stay in July on Phuket, there was some criticism that dinners and meetings started late.

However, Phuket resort managers were confident that the island would host the 16 national leaders in October.

Today Khun Kasit said: ''After consulting with security agencies, we decided to choose Cha-Am/Hua Hin for the meeting.''

He said the decision had been conveyed to the other countries. Invited to attend in October are the leaders of the 10 Asean nations plus China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

Just last week, an ambassador from one of the 16 countries was inspecting the facilities at the Hilton Phuket Arcadia Resort and Spa in Karon, where most of the events were expected to be centred.

The summit, scheduled for October 23-25, would have coincided with the Phuket Vegetarian Festival, a lively annual event that will run from October 18-26 this year.

The Asean Plus Six gathering has a storm-tossed history.

It was scheduled to be held in December but had to be delayed because of the yellow-shirt invasion of Suvarnabhumi International Airport.

Then it was to be held on Phuket in April, but advance holiday bookings for Songkran meant there was not the right type of accommodation available for such a large gathering.

Switched to Pattaya, red-shirt protesters invaded the host resort before the summit could begin and the gathering was cancelled, amid great embarrassment to Thailand.

An attempt was made to quickly recover with a planned summit on Phuket in July. However, not all leaders were able to make that early deadline and a summit in October was eventually considered the better option.

Now the Asean summit decision-makers have plumped for Cha-Am and Hua Hin. Phuket's supporters will be wondering: ''Is it something, we said or did?''

The Governor of Phuket, Wichai Praisa-nob, was in Bangkok today and not available to comment. He is likely to be disappointed, having led the beautification of the island's roads for the Asean Foreign Ministers' summit, shaped a volunteer security system labelled the ''Thousand Eyes of the Pineapple'' and extracted promises that there would be no blockades or demonstrations by red-shirts or over local issues.

Thailand's role as rotating chair of Asean ends with the summit. The other Asean nations are Brunei, Indonesia, Singapore, Burma, Malaysia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and the Philippines.

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