[Bangkok Post] Thai police have dismissed reports that the bombings in Bangkok were in revenge for the death of a suspected rebel sympathizer who died while in detention at a military camp in the far South. Deputy spokesman Krissana Pattanacharoen denied the reports and said that Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha has instructed national police chief Chakthip Chaijinda to step up efforts to track down and arrest those involved.According to earlier reports, two men from the far South who were arrested in connection with a bomb found at the Royal Thai Police (RTP) headquarters claimed they and eight accomplices wanted to create chaos in Bangkok to avenge the death of a suspected sympathizer detained at a military camp. The two men, both from Rueso district of Narathiwat, were apprehended on an inter-provincial bus at a police checkpoint in Chumphon province on Friday.
A security camera had captured images of a man dropping a suspicious looking object near the fence outside RTP headquarters on Thursday evening. The object was found to be a time bomb set to go off at 8am on Friday, but it was defused. Another source on the investigation team said security camera footage showed another four suspects allegedly involved in the bombings.
The four men boarded an inter-provincial bus from Songkhla's Hat Yai district on July 31 and got off at Mo Chit bus terminal in Bangkok the following day. The four then took a taxicab to Makro's Rangsit branch in Pathum Thani province where they changed their clothes before splitting into two groups of two, each group taking separate cabs.
One headed to a government complex on Chaeng Watthana Road in Bangkok and the other went to the Office of the Permanent Secretary for Defense in Nonthaburi's Pak Kret district. They then took cabs to Mo Chit, where they took a bus back to Hat Yai district on Thursday evening. Bombs went off at the two locations on Friday morning, the source said.
The source added the four suspects spoke Yawee, the Malay dialect spoken by locals in the far South.
| Thai police may well have evidence I know nothing about, but it is interesting that every paragraph in my summary of the article, other than the first, is full of details about what's being denied. |