Thai police arrest ‘bomber’ at border checkpoint

THAI authorities arrested a man they believe is part of a group responsible for a bombing at a shrine in central Bangkok two weeks ago, the prime minister announced yesterday.

A picture of one of the suspects being hunted. Picture: Getty

He said the suspect resembles a yellow-shirted man in a surveillance video who police say planted the bomb.

“It would be great if he were (the bomber). Then we will know who they are, where they came from, who’s behind this,” Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha said.

He said the man is a foreigner and was detained in eastern Thailand near the Cambodian border, one of several border crossings where authorities set up checkpoints after the August 17 bombing which killed 20 people, many of them foreign tourists, and injured more than 120.

Prayuth said authorities plan to check fingerprints and conduct DNA tests to establish whether the man is the bomber. Police say they obtained the bomber’s DNA from a motorcycle taxi and a three-wheeled tuk-tuk taxi that he used.

Prayuth said officials knew from their investigation that people involved in the bombing were about to flee the country and had traced the man to Aranyaprathet district in Sa Kaeo, a major crossing point to Cambodia. The prime minister described the man as a piece in a jigsaw puzzle that would connect various parts of the case, which also included a bomb that exploded harmlessly in a river next to a busy pier in Bangkok the day after the shrine blast.

Prayuth warned against speculating about the arrested man until more information is gleaned.

“Don’t say just yet it’s about this and that. It could affect international affairs,” he said. “We have to do a lot of tests, fingerprints. If he is the guy, he is the guy.”

The blast at the Erawan Shrine was unprecedented in the Thai capital, where smaller bombs have been employed in domestic political violence over the past decade, but not in an effort to cause large-scale casualties.

Security officials arrested a man on Saturday during a raid on a Bangkok apartment that contained some bomb-making materials, and Thai military authorities have been interrogating him. He has been linked to the shrine bombing, but the authorities have not yet released his name or nationality.

Arrest warrants were issued on Monday for two more suspects, a Thai woman and a man of unknown nationality, after a raid on a second apartment found more bomb-making materials. Relatives of the woman who had rented the second apartment told authorities she is innocent and is now in Turkey, married to a Turkish man.

The suspect arrested on Saturday had a Turkish passport, though Thai authorities say it was fake. At his apartment, they seized 200 passports in all.