In the story linked above, there are a couple of photos showing the blast location. The bombs were placed behind an electrical transformer at the BMA Express on the walkway into the shopping complex from Siam Skytrain Station (the Skytrain is our elevated mass transit). BMA stands for Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, the city government. That kiosk is where the wife has in the past taken care of business like renewing her ID card. Plus we spend a lot of time in Siam Paragon ourselves, were there just Saturday morning, and right there where the bombs went off is where just a month or two ago I set my backpack down to pull out something we needed to show a shopkeeper.
Siam Paragon was the largest shopping center in Thailand when it opened just over nine years ago. But then the red shirts gutted Central World shopping center down the street during the 2010 riots, and they rebuilt it to be bigger than Paragon. But Paragon remains one of the largest in Asia and attracts a lot of tourists.
The linked report makes it sound like both bombs went off in the same place, but I’m also hearing that one went off there and the second one a little ways down by the fountain.
The authorities are not ruling out any motive, but the bomb parts they’ve recovered and the way they were fashioned reportedly match the style of bombs used in last year’s red-shirt protests and in a red-shirt bomb factory uncovered on the edge of Bangkok before. Arrests are expected soon. I’ve heard CCTV footage has already revealed some interesting video.
They say 90% of the pieces they found match those found when two other red-shirt bombers accidentally blew themselves up last year on the edge of Bangkok. The authorities have identified two men spotted on CCTV and have issued arrest warrants for them, but they’ve not released their names. They seem to be quietly hunting them. It would not surprise me to hear some sort of accident befell them before much longer.
Small update. The carpark at the Criminal Court got hit by a grenade last weekend. Suspects have been arrested. Not mentioned in this story but has been in others is police and soldiers had been tipped off and were waiting for them. After the two guys who grenaded the carpark tried to flee, they were captured after a brief gunfight, one shot three times but still alive. They’ve been naming names of accomplices and who hired them. I’ve heard they’ve been linked to the Siam Paragon explosion too.
And five months after that explosion, we’ve just had a huge-ass explosion tonight right smack dab in the middle of Bangkok. That’s the Ratchaprasong intersection, which seems to be a magnet for political violence. Bombs went off there on New Year’s Eve in 2006, just a few months after Thaksin’s ouster in a military coup. The big Central World shopping center on the corner was burned down in the 2010 riots.
Seems to be the largest blast for a long time. It’s not clear if it was one or two explosions, but there seems to have been an unexploded bomb they were defusing last I heard. Lots of Chinese tourists among the dead and injured. I hear the crater is huge. This is what happens when you don’t lock up the fucking red shirts.
I just passed over that intersection on the Skytrain on Saturday, and the weekend before the wife and I both walked on the Skywalk above going to Central World.
EDIT: The wife tells me she was just at the Erawan Shrine, ground zero for the blast, on Friday.
The death toll is now 16, but really, I think once they get all the body parts pieced back together, then we’ll get a truer picture. One victim was reportedly seen being literally split in half by the force of the explosion.
Yeah, I saw that too, but I don’t know where that’s coming from. No one in Thailand is reporting a death toll that high, although that wouldn’t surprise me.
What honestly surprises is this doesn’t happen more often. Security is pretty lax, because the government is trying not too tick too many people off. Bag checks at the entrances to shopping malls and department stores are a joke. People with bags routinely just wander in and ignore the security. Myself too, I just waltz past them. If they do check a bag, they’ll just look in one compartment even if there are two or three other compartments, and they’ll just glance at the top of whatever’s in there. I could easily sneak a bomb in. And usually not all the entrances are covered by security, there’s almost always at least one entrance with no security, or several, especially if you’re coming in from a car park.
I read once once of these two farang (Western) tourists who thought the bag checks were for real and stopped to empty everything out of their bags much to the bemusement of the security staff who were just trying to wave them though, and to the anger of all the people behind them who were wondering what the hell these ditzy girls were doing.
The government has already announced more stringent bag checks, but I’ll believe that when I see it. If it happens, expect it to last for only a few days.
I think it’s premature to assign responsibility just now. I trust the Red Shirts as far as I can throw them, but it’s better to wait for facts, if any to surface.
It is sickening in any case, a cowardly, barbaric act.
Security here in Manila will make you open your bag then poke at the contents with a stick. If you’re in a car, security will ask you to open your trunk. They also have a long stick with a mirror attached to examine your vehicle’s undercarriage. I have never heard of them actually finding anything nor do I know what they’ll do if they do discover something.
