The popular tourist location of Phuket in the country’s south was also hit with explosions, while 2 more bombs were reported to have detonated in the provinces of Trang and Surat Thani, killing 2 people.
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Hua Hin is about 200 kilometers (120 miles) south of Bangkok.
By midnight it was a scene of “chaos”, Edwin Weik, Founder of Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand, who went to the site of the first two blasts in Hua Hin told AAP.
The explosions all occurred south of Bangkok and several of the blasts – including one on Patong beach in the tourist resort of Phuket – appeared created to hit the tourism industry. The city is home to a swath of beachfront resorts as well as a royal palace.
British vacationer Darren Hilling was lounging by his hotel pool in Hua Hin when a pair of blasts shook the Friday morning calm, “quite loud, sounded very close to here”. The ruling junta has declared that defending the monarchy is its priority, especially as there is concern about the process to succeed the ailing 88-year-old king, who is the world’s longest reigning monarch. “No political aim justifies violence and attacks on innocent people”, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in a statement.
Speaking later at a hospital, he said he fell down and saw people “screaming, the glass broken, table broken, confusion”.
Prayut asked the public not to be panic and not to make any assumption as the culprits are still at large.
The most devastating explosion occurred overnight in Hua Hin on a busy street filled with bars and restaurants.
The violence occurred just ahead of the anniversary of the August 17, 2015, bombing of Bangkok’s popular Erawan Shrine, which left 20 dead and injured more than 120.
In the 10pm incident, two high-explosive bombs exploded minutes apart in a street near entertainment premises which at that time were packed with revellere including foreigners, leaving a woman street vendor dead. Several of the injured were in serious condition, the reports said.
He said it seemed foreigners were being targeted. Their nationalities were not immediately known.
Thailand’s valuable tourism industry is reeling after a series of bombs and arson attacks Friday killed four people and injured at least 30 people, many of them foreign visitors. This is a resort town in Phang Nga province and Surat Thani. Although their targets have overwhelmingly been confined to Thailand’s three southernmost provinces, the militants have apparently carried out isolated attacks elsewhere detonating, for example, a auto bomb in the underground parking lot of a mall on the tourist island of Koh Samui in April 2015 that wounded at least seven people. Nearly all the violence has been in the three southernmost provinces.
General Prawit Wongsuwan, a deputy prime minister in Thailand’s military-run government, said the attacks were “absolutely conducted by the same network”.
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Supporters of Shinawatra and her brother Thaksin, who also served as prime minister until 2006 when the military ousted him, have been arrested and questioned by the army during its rule, causing outcries from civil rights groups. Don Pathan, a security analyst based in southern Thailand, said that the latest attacks didn’t seem to fit the militants’ traditional pattern of operations, but that if they were responsible, “it would definitely be a game changer” that could herald a new chapter in the conflict. Critics say it is undemocratic and is fashioned to keep the military in control for at least five more years even if a free election is held.
