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Thai bomb suspect linked to other blasts
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DOMESTIC politics could have been a factor in last month’s deadly Bangkok blast, Thai police said yesterday as they revealed that one local suspect was linked to previous bombings.
Mystery still surrounds the motive for the August 17 attack on a religious shrine in a busy shopping district which killed 20 people, the majority of them Chinese tourists.
Investigators previously said it was most probably a revenge attack by a people-smuggling gang angered at a recent crackdown.
Two foreigners accused of planting the bomb have been arrested and charged.
One is a Chinese passport-holder with Uygur ethnicity and the other, according to his lawyer, is a Chinese Uygur who settled in Turkey.
Arrest warrants are out for a further 17 others.
Senior police officers repeated the people-smuggling revenge theory at a press conference yesterday.
But they said those with local political grievances might still be involved and could have teamed up with an international people-smuggling gang.
“It could be two groups of people who have the same aims to achieve the same thing. One group might have used the other group but they both earned the same benefit,” Somyot Poompanmoung, the national police chief who retires tomorrow, told reporters.
It is the first time police have suggested a link to Thailand’s turbulent street politics.
Explaining their latest theory in an investigation beset with contradictory and confusing statements, police said one Thai national wanted in connection with the bomb blast was called Yongyuth Phobkaew, also known as “Odd.”
Police said he is linked to a motorcycle bomb last year that killed two people and a 2010 blast at an apartment complex in which four died.
At the time police blamed the 2010 blast on the “Red Shirt” movement loyal to ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
Police believe Odd was also involved in the shrine blast.
“Odd was in the team making the bomb,” Sriwara Ransibrahmanakul, head of the Metropolitan Police Bureau, told reporters. “He does not have enough knowledge to make the entire bomb but he provided equipment.”
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