THAI POLICE HUNT FOR BOMBER
Suspect on security video: officials
Thai investigators believe a man seen in security video wearing a yellow T- shirt and carrying a backpack set off the bomb at a central Bangkok shrine that killed 20 people and injured more than 100, police said Tuesday.
“The yellow shirt guy is not just the suspect. He is the bomber,” said police spokesman Lt. Gen. Prawut Thavornsiri.
Prawut earlier released several photos of the man, with and without the backpack, on social media. The images were apparently taken from closed- circuit video at the Erawan Shrine on Monday evening before the bomb exploded.
A video posted separately on Thai media appeared to show the same man, with youthful shaggy dark hair, sitting on a bench at the crowded shrine, then taking off the backpack and leaving it behind as he walked away.
Prime Minister Prayuth Chanocha called Monday’s explosion at a busy intersection “the worst incident that has ever happened in Thailand,” and promised to track down those responsible.
“There have been minor bombs or just noise, but this time they aimed for innocent lives,” Prayuth said Tuesday. “They want to destroy our economy, our tourism.”
Without elaborating about possible perpetrators, the prime minister said, “Today we have seen the closed- circuit footage, we saw some suspects, but it wasn’t clear. We have to find them first.”
Bangkok was rattled again Tuesday when another explosive device blew up at a ferry pier often used by tourists, but no one was hurt.
“The bomb at Sathorn Pier was also a pipe bomb and it might be related to the ( Monday) bombing,” said Prawut, the police spokesman. Another police official, Senior Sgt. Maj. Worapong Boonthawee, said it was thrown from the Taksin Bridge and blew up at Sathorn Pier after falling into the Chao Phraya River below. “There is no injury,” he said. Security camera video showed a sudden blast of water over a walkway at the pier as bystanders run for safety.
Monday’s improvised explosive device, which police say was made from a pipe and weighed three kilograms, scattered body parts, spattered blood, blasted windows and burned motorbikes. The explosion went off around 7 p. m. in an upscale area filled with tourists, office workers and shoppers.
The bomb exploded at Erawan Shrine, which is dedicated to the Hindu god Brahma, but is extremely popular among Thailand’s Buddhists as well as Chinese tourists. Although Thailand is predominantly Buddhist, it has enormous Hindu influence on its religious practices and language.
No one has claimed responsibility.
Defence Minister Prawit Wongsuwan said authorities had no idea an attack had been planned.
“We didn’t know about this ahead of time. We had no intelligence on this attack,” he said.
Prayuth vowed to “hurry and find the bombers,” though he noted there may be just one perpetrator. Speaking to reporters, he continued what has been a notoriously prickly relationship with the media since the former general took control of the government in a May 2014 coup.
Asked if there were leads on the suspects’ identities, Prayuth bristled: “We are still investigating. The bomb has just exploded — why are you asking now? Do you understand the word investigation? It’s not like they claim responsibility.”
Thailand has seen many violent attacks in recent years, particularly in a more- than- decade- long insurgency by Muslim separatists that has left more than 5,000 dead in the country’s deep south. Those attacks have never extended to the capital, however.
Bangkok has seen politically charged violence over the past decade; the deadliest, in 2010, killed more than 90 over two months and was centred on the same intersection where Monday’s bomb went off.
But none of those attacks included a bomb blast that seemed intended to produce mass casualties.
Matthew Wheeler, Southeast Asia security analyst for the International Crisis Group, said the bombing was a “new type of attack for Bangkok” that doesn’t bear the trademarks of typical violence over the past decade from political instability or Muslim separatists.
“It is certainly not like politically motivated attacks we’ve seen in the past which have generally been designed to grab attention but not cause casualties,” Wheeler said, adding that he expected it would have “major ramifications for security in Thailand.”
The suspect seen in the video wearing a yellow shirt raised initial questions about whether authorities believed the violence was politically motivated, since one group of previous protesters was known to wear yellow shirts. But officials have not linked the attack to Thai politics.