Police hunting for the perpetrators of Thailand’s deadliest bombing have arrested a second foreign suspect, prime minister Prayuth Chan-ocha said on Tuesday.
The male suspect was arrested in Sa Kaeo province, which is east of Bangkok on the border with Cambodia, Prayuth said.
"We have arrested one more, he is not a Thai," Mr Prayuth told reporters after a weekly cabinet meeting.
Thai police expanded their investigation into the attack on Monday, seizing explosives from a suburban apartment building and warning that the group they are pursuing had been preparing “quite a lot of bombs.“
Yet two weeks after the attack, which killed 20 people, the authorities have remained vague on the possible motives of the perpetrators and have refused to classify the blast as terrorism, despite what security experts say was a clear intent to cause maximum civilian casualties.
The August 17th blast at Erawan - a popular Hindu shrine in the heart of the city - was the worst bombing in Thailand in decades.
Thailand’s military government has decreed that officials call the attack a “disturbance” and ordered all government agencies “to avoid using the terms terrorism or sabotage.”
One of the leading theories about the attack is that it was connected to the repatriation in July of more than 100 ethnic Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority who live in northwestern China.
The Thai news media have speculated that the group‘s repatriation to China may have prompted a revenge attack.
The same Thai directive that instructed officials to avoid the word terrorism, issued by the interior ministry, also barred officials from “mentioning any connection to Uighurs in this incident as it could create problems and have an international impact.“
The July repatriation was widely criticised at the time by the United Nations and Western governments because of the prospect that the Uighurs would face persecution in China. Thailand's consulate in Istanbul was attacked soon after the Uighurs were sent back. But any Uighur connection to the shrine bombing has yet to be established.
Commentators in Thailand have criticised numerous missteps in the investigation, including the showing on national television of what appeared to be a suicide vest when the police were revealing evidence seized from an apartment Saturday. The police later said that the vest had nothing to do with the case.
The national chief of police had offered a reward of about $84,000 for assistance in finding the perpetrators of the bombing, money that he said had come from his own pocket and that of a friend. On Monday, he announced that the money would be awarded to the police themselves. Officers working on the case deserved the cash, he said.
The authorities issued two warrants Monday, including one for Wanna Suansan (27) a woman from a Muslim area in southern Thailand whose family said she had married a Turk and moved to Turkey.
Just hours after the release of her name and photograph, Wanna’s family said she had moved to Turkey months before the shrine attack.
Ibrahim Komkham, the head of the village in southern Thailand where Wanna's family lives, said that she had spoken to him by phone, telling him she had left the apartment in June and did not understand why the police thought she was a suspect.
Ms Wanna was willing to come back to Thailand to prove her innocence, he said. He quoted her as saying she would "surrender anywhere, anytime."
The police said they posted the warrant for Wanna’s arrest after they raided a house late Sunday where they found gunpowder and urea fertilizer, among other items.
In a separate raid on Saturday, the police arrested a foreign man and seized bomb-making materials, including fuses, pipes and ball bearings of the kind that they said were used in the shrine attack.
The suspect arrested Saturday had a fake Turkish passport. The police have declined to disclose his nationality, or whether they know it. Police officials said that information gained from him had helped them discover the apartment that was raided Sunday night.
"We found evidence that indicated the preparation to produce quite a lot of bombs," said General Somyot Poompanmoung, Thailand's national chief of police. "We are concerned."
Reuters, NYT