The events are connected, carefully planned and carried out across many areas and masterminded by one individual, Pongsapat said.
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At least two men have been held for questioning over the blasts in Hua Hin – struck by four of the bombs – and a third was arrested over a suspected arson attack in a separate province, police said.
On Thursday and early Friday, two series of blasts shook the Hua Hin resort in southern Thailand killing at least two people and injuring 28 others. At this time, authorities do not believe the attacks were a result of global terrorism, nor were they potentially related to the Erawin Shrine bombings which killed 20 people nearly exactly one year ago.
If it turns out insurgents were responsible for last week’s bombings, it would mark a risky new expansion of the low-level war that has plagued the mostly Buddhist country’s southern border region with Malaysia.
Many people are changing their destination, opting to go to some other country because of the attack in Thailand, another travel agent said. The Shinawatra clan or their allies have won every election in Thailand since 2001 and remain popular with poor, mostly rural Thais whom their spending policies favored.
LOCAL media reports say that Thai authorities have sought cooperation from Malaysia to investigate a mobile phone found at one of the locations in Phuket where bombs rocked popular tourist spots. Until now, BRN-C attacks have been nearly exclusively confined to their remote home geography, namely the southernmost provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala, with less frequent assaults on adjacent Songkhla province, and have mainly avoided Western targets that could internationalize their local complaints and grievances.
Three homemade bombs exploded Sunday night in Yala town, causing property damage but no casualties, while roadside bombs detonated Monday morning in Narathiwat province injured two patrolling soldiers.
Narongchai Wongthanavimok, chief financial officer at national carrier Thai Airways, Thailand’s national carrier, said on Friday the bombings would hurt business and consumer confidence.
A bomb attack at the popular Erawan Shrine in Bangkok on August 17 previous year killed 20 people, more than half of them Asian tourists, but it did not seriously undermine the industry.
But this time was different: the targets were not in the country’s three southernmost provinces, where a bitter war waged by Muslim separatists has flared for more than a decade.
The attacks, including the use of staggered bombs created to target people responding to an initial smaller blast, were consistent with known insurgent tactics in the deep South.
At last Sunday’s referendum voters in Thaksin’s northeast stronghold voted to reject the constitution, which opponents of the junta said would entrench the military’s power and deepen divisions.
Tourism Authority of Thailand governor Yutthasak Supasorn said TAT would step up campaign to promote short-haul tourism market in case long-haul tourism market is still anxious with safety concern.
Their political network has come under heavy surveillance by the military since the 2014 coup.
The bombings in top tourist destinations, including the island of Phuket, threaten a vital source of income for Thailand.
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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.
