Outside of last year’s Koh Samui bomb, in December 2013 separatist militants stole a truck from the far South, packed a twin-bomb with a blast radius of 500 meters on the back and parked it behind a police station in Phuket.
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Narongchai Wongthanavimok, the chief financial officer at Thai Airways, Thailand’s national airline, said on Friday the bombings would hurt business and consumer confidence.
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) will work closely with police to track down the owner of the mobile phone used to detonate bombs in the recent Thai bombings.
The incidents were part of a series of bomb blasts and arson attacks in the southern Thai region during Aug 11-14, in which a total of four people were killed and dozens others injured.
A bomb attack on a Bangkok shrine on August 17 a year ago, killed 20 people, more than half of them Asian tourists, but it did not seriously undermine the industry.
Meanwhile, security agencies have managed to neutralise eight other explosives.
Last week’s attacks hit tourist resort towns further north – a highly unusual assault in a country where foreign visitors are rarely caught up in political violence.
A string of overnight attacks have highlighted how the insurgency continues to rage in the three Muslim majority provinces bordering Malaysia.
Police said yesterday said they had arrested one man for arson.
Police say they have ruled out worldwide terrorism and denied some analysts’ suggestions that the attacks were connected to a simmering insurgency in Thailand’s southern tip.
Thai police, in fact, have come under fire in the past over investigations into high profile cases, including the brutal murders of two British backpackers on a tourist island in 2014. No group has immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks.
The attacks came days after Thailand voted to accept a new constitution that paves the way for an election in 2017 and, say critics, enshrines the military’s already considerable power.
Professor Abuza said the goal of the Thai army has been to clearly degrade the insurgency and get violence to a low enough level that they can attribute it to criminality and thus have no need to make any meaningful concessions at the negotiating table.
Perhaps, if leaders on both sides had taken the time and thought less about winning at all costs and paid more attention to certain aspects, such as fairness in dealings with people who oppose their views, Thailand might not have ended up the way it is today.
“These acts were undertaken by a group in many areas simultaneously, following orders from one individual”, said Pongsapat Pongcharoen, national deputy police chief.
Away from the deep south Thailand has been battered by a decade of political unrest, driven by a bitter power struggle between the military-allied elite and populist forces loyal to ousted democratically elected governments run by the Shinawatra clan.
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Defence Minister Prawit Wongsuwan on Monday said the attacks might have involved southern insurgents hired to carry out the bombings but said the bombings were not an extension of a bloody separatist war in the country’s three southern-most Muslim-dominated provinces.
