Thai investigators are reopening the possibility Muslim militants from the far south might have planted bombs in Bangkok that killed three people on New Year's Eve, a top Justice Ministry official said on Friday.Sunai Manomai-udom, head of the ministry's Department of Special Investigation (DSI), said a man caught on a security camera near one of the places hit was also a suspect in a series of bank bombs in the three southernmost provinces. "We think it's him," Sunai told Channel 3 television.
He named the man as Thawansak Jehna, for whom an arrest warrant was issued in October in connection with bombs in the Muslim-majority southern province of Yala. Sunai said police and DSI investigators had spotted Thawansak, along with another man and a woman, on security video from a mall where a bomb hidden in a tube of potato chips had been defused.
In the immediate aftermath of the blasts, the army-installed government ruled out militants from the far south, where 2,000 people have died in a three-year separatist campaign of shootings and bombings. Instead, they inferred that Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, ousted in a Sept. 19 military coup, or elements in the police and army still loyal to him were behind the attacks.
Sunai also told a Bangkok radio station the DSI had asked Interpol for help in identifying the other two suspects on the tape. The police sent the tape to the FBI and DSI had sent the video to Denmark, a member of the council of coup leaders told reporters on Friday, adding he doubted either agency would find enough evidence to arrest anyone. "I have full confidence in the dedication of the police and the DSI, but I am not confident that they will have enough evidence to arrest anybody," General Anupong Paochinda said.
Last week, police released without charge a group of 19 people -- a mixture of police, military and civilians -- detained seven days earlier on suspicion of involvement.