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Tuesday 18 August 2015
Thailand hunts shrine attack suspect as device 'thrown from Bangkok bridge'
A small explosive device has been thrown from a bridge in Bangkok the day after a bomb blast at a popular shrine in the Thai capital killed 22 people and injured 123.
Police said a device appeared to have been thrown towards a pier from
the Taksin bridge. Security camera footage showed people on a walkway
at the Sathorn pier being showered with water after the object fell into
the Chao Phraya river. No link has been made to Monday’s attack and no
one was hurt.
“If it did not fall in the water then it certainly would have caused injuries,” a deputy police chief told Reuters.
Thailand’s defence minister has said authorities are close to determining who detonated Monday’s bomb.
“It is much clearer who the bombers are, but I can’t reveal right
now,” Prawit Wongsuwan said on Tuesday. “We have suspects. There are not
many people.”
Thai authorities said they were hunting a suspect who had been seen
on footage from security cameras near the scene of the blast. Broadcast
on Thai media, the footage shows a man in a yellow T-shirt sitting on a
bench and taking off a large, black backpack. He then stands up and
walks away before checking his phone.
The national police chief, Somyot Poompanmoung, said the suspect
could be Thai or a foreigner. “We need to look at the before and after
CCTV footage to see if there is a link,” Somyot told reporters.
Thailand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “For the time being, it
is too early to determine the possible motives or who the perpetrators
may be.” The prime minister, Prayuth Chan-ocha,
was quoted by news agencies as saying the suspect was believed to be
from an “anti-government group based in Thailand’s north-east”. The area
is a stronghold of support for the redshirt movement which backs the former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted by the military in 2006. But Thai media later said the quote was not referring to the suspect.
No group has claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Erawan
Shrine, a major attraction for visitors from Asia and for Thai people.
Dedicated to the Hindu god Brahma, it is also popular among Thailand’s
Buddhist and Chinese tourists.
Forensic police teams in white gloves spent Tuesday morning combing
through glass and debris at the intersection where the bomb exploded,
while the army stood guard.
The four major roads leading to the site, normally packed with
traffic, had been blocked off by police. At midday, street cleaners
entered the site and started to hose down the area, suggesting the scene
investigation had finished.
Thai police have finished gathering evidence at Bangkok blast scene. Cleaners move into shrine. pic.twitter.com/uJ4rBtLli7
Prayuth told media the attack “is the worst incident that has ever happened in Thailand”.
“There have been minor bombs or just noise, but this time they aimed
for innocent lives,” he said. “They want to destroy our economy, our
tourism.”
Much of the violence in the south-east Asian nation stems from a
low-level insurgency waged by Muslim separatists in the south, but the
country’s army chief said on Tuesday that the attack did not bear the
hallmarks of the rebels.
“This does not match with incidents in southern Thailand.
The type of bomb used is also not in keeping with the south,” the Royal
Thai Army chief and deputy defence minister, General Udomdej Sitabutr,
said in a televised interview.
Eight foreigners were killed in the explosion, including three from the Chinese mainland, two from Hong Kong, two from Malaysia and one from the Philippines.
More than 20 of the 123 injured people were Chinese, according to a statement posted on the website of China’s embassy in Bangkok. They sustained both “moderate and severe” injuries, China’s official news agency, Xinhau, said.
“It is beyond the imagination of Chinese people that a blast could
happen at the famous Erawan shrine,” the Global Times, a Communist
party-controlled tabloid, said in an editorial. “It has almost the same impact on Chinese tourists as if it happened in China.” Beijing said
it had demanded that embassy officials in Bangkok find out what had
happened and to “go all-out to help treat the injured people”.
At the nearby police hospital, Chinese volunteer translators waited
in the lobby for the families and friends of several Chinese tourists
who has been killed and wounded in the blast, which ripped through the area at 7pm on Monday.
More than 6,500 people have been killed in the long-running
insurgency in the south of the country since 2004, but militants have
not launched an attack of this scale on the capital.
Bangkok has witnessed violent protests from opposing political groups
since 2006 but foreigners are rarely caught in the bloodshed. An
indiscriminate bomb attack killing large numbers of people is unheard of
in recent memory.
Poompanmoung told reporters the blast was caused by a pipe bomb.
Bangkok bomb explosion caught on tourist’s mobile phone.
Link to video.
Tourism is one of the few bright spots in an economy that continues to underperform more than a year after the military seized power in May 2014.
It accounts for about 10% of the economy, and the government had
expected a record number of visitors this year after a sharp fall in
2014 during months of street protests and the coup.
The scene on Monday evening included burnt-out motorcycles, rubble from the shrine’s wall and pools of blood on the street.
“There were bodies everywhere,” Marko Cunningham, a New Zealand
paramedic working with a Bangkok ambulance service, told Reuters. “Some
were shredded. There were legs where heads were supposed to be. It was
horrific,” he told Reuters.
He said the blast had left a 2-metre-wide crater and wounded people several hundred metres away.
The Nation television channel reported that the government would set
up a “war room” to coordinate a response. Two pipe bombs exploded in the
same district in February but did not cause significant damage.
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