He’s wearing a yellow T-shirt and dark-framed glasses. “The type of bomb used is also not in keeping with the south”, army chief and deputy defense minister General Udomdej Sitabutr said in a televised interview. The site is surrounded by a string of other large hotels and malls that draw tens of thousands of visitors each day. Although Thailand is predominantly Buddhist, it has enormous Hindu influence on its religious practices and language.
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Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha said authorities are trying to find suspects after viewing security camera footage.
Raising tension in the city on Tuesday, a small explosive was thrown from a bridge over a river but no one was injured, a police officer at the scene said.
He also said that Thai authorities had no prior intelligence about the attack.
It was not immediately clear if the two blasts were connected.
The blast comes at a sensitive time for Thailand, which has been riven for a decade by a sometimes violent struggle for power between political factions in Bangkok.
“It was like this huge gust of wind and debris flying through you”, recalled Sanjeev Vyas, a DJ from Mumbai, India, who was in the middle of the fray.
“Our ears were ringing, we hit the floor and there was shrapnel everywhere, smoke and people screaming”. “People are screaming”. “Some were shredded. There were legs where heads were supposed to be”, said Marko Cunningham, a New Zealand paramedic working with a Bangkok ambulance service, according to Reuters. “I saw five bodies near a shrine”. People who visit the shrine to offer prayers were directly hit by blasts, and charred motorcycles and other vehicles had crowded the intersection.
Australian tourist John Murray told Sky News he was on the walkway overlooking the shrine and felt the full force of the explosion.
One emergency worker said a hand was found on the fifth floor of a nearby building.
No one claimed responsibility for the incident.
The dead included Chinese and a Filipino, Mr Somyot said. “They want to create unrest and hurt tourism”.
The capital, which was convulsed by political unrest last year, has experienced small-scale bomb and grenade attacks in the past. Two pipe bombs exploded in the same district in February but did not cause significant damage.
But Monday’s attack was of a different magnitude altogether.
The bombing killed 12 people at the scene and injured over a hundred of others.
The attack is believed to be from an anti-government group. The area, which is normally a busy intersection, remained cordoned off early Tuesday as police tightened security, media reports said. “This does not seem to bear their fingerprints”.
The Thai baht fell by as much as 0.8% to 35.648 against the dollar, the lowest level since April 2009 and worse than during last year’s military coup. The group is largely made up of rural and urban poor loyal to the previous Shinawatra government. “They don’t go around bombing innocent civilians”. “They aim to destroy tourism, economy, our country”.
Prawit said this morning that investigators are getting closer to determining who set off the bomb, though he did not give further details.
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Thai National Police Chief, Somyot Poompummuang, said there is no doubt that tourists were targeted.
