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| 2015 Bangkok Bombing | The Day After (Image: Flick User - Andy Zingo) |
By Shawn W. Crispin
The Diplomat’s Shawn Crispin conducts an in-depth investigation into the recent Erawan Shrine bombing.
While Thailand’s police claim success in apprehending and identifying foreign suspects in the country’s deadliest-ever bomb attack, national intelligence agencies are pursuing local actors as the likely masterminds behind the crime. Rather than an act of ideologically-driven international terrorism, as portrayed by security analysts and echoed in media reports, the lethal explosion was more likely an act of local commission, motivated by rising tensions between rival political and security force factions jockeying for position ahead of a high-stakes royal succession.
Foreign envoys, top government advisers, former high-ranking officials, and private investigators who spoke to The Diplomat on condition of anonymity all point toward probable rogue security force involvement in the sophisticated yet locally attuned August 17 blast. The pipe bomb killed 20 and injured over 125 at Bangkok’s Erawan religious shrine. Hidden by multiple layers of deniability, official obfuscation, and patchy police work, the local masterminds likely acted in coordination with foreign criminals with prior links to wayward security officials to execute the politically sensitive attack, the same sources said.
The recent arrests of two suspects of unknown nationality and warrants issued for a handful of others is consistent with this narrative. The arrests have raised as many questions as they have answered about a motive. A police spokesman said this week the suspects were linked to a human trafficking “syndicate” and that the bomb may have been a “revenge attack” against a recent crackdown on the trade. Under intense international pressure, since July Thai prosecutors have indicted 72 people, including state officials and a senior military officer, for having links to foreign-linked people smuggling networks active in Thailand.
The circumstances surrounding the arrests, like much of the police’s investigative work on the bombing, have strained credulity in light of the sophistication of the actual attack. The first unidentified suspect was captured in a rented room in a Bangkok suburb sitting calmly among piles of incriminating bomb-making materials and a stack of forged passports. The second was apprehended on the Thai-Cambodian border carrying a backpack apparently containing the same distinctive yellow T-shirt that the alleged bomber was seen wearing in CCTV footage at the shrine moments before the fatal blast.
Read the full story at The Diplomat