Thai police question third man in relation to bombing

By Max Constant

BANGKOK

Thai police are reported to be questioning a third suspect Thursday in connection with the Aug. 17 bombing in central Bangkok in which 20 people died.

Local media reported that the man was being held by police because he had phoned a Thai Muslim woman wanted for renting apartments in which bomb making equipment and false passports were found.

The 38-year-old Thai Muslim man is from Narathiwat, in insurgency plagued southern Thailand.

He is being detained and questioned at a military facility, reported Thai language Isra News Agency.

It said that he is being held due to a phone call he made to Wanna Suansan, a Thai Muslim woman from southern Phang Nga province, on Tuesday - the day after an arrest warrant was issued for her.

Police have been unable to locate Suansan, and immigration records show she left Thailand with her husband - a foreign national, for whom an arrest warrant has also been issued - on July 1 on a flight for Abu Dhabi.

Thai police spokesman Prawut Thavornsiri told reporters Wednesday that Suansan’s husband is accused of “belonging to a network that provided accommodation” to those connected to the bombing.

The first suspect - who various Thai media outlets have named as a Bilal Mohammed - was arrested Saturday during the police raid on apartment blocks where police spokesman Lt. Gen. Prawuth Thawornsiri has said a large amount of materials used to construct bombs - including metal pipes, ball bearings, wires and detonators - were found along with a large cache of fake Turkish passports.

The Bangkok Post has reported an unnamed police source close to the investigation as saying that the arrest of the foreign man -- who also held a fake Turkish passport -- came after officials spent more than a week sifting through mobile phone calls made near the Hindu shrine in central Bangkok where the bombing took place.

Police are suspected of being able to trace the man arrested Thursday through a similar search of Suansan's phone records.

The second suspect was arrested Wednesday near the Cambodian border. Deputy-police chief Chaktip Chaijinda has said that he was carrying a Chinese passport with Xinjiang as the birthplace, but -- given the large amounts of forged passports discovered in the apartment -- its authenticity has still to be verified.

According to police, the man later confessed during interrogation to having been present at the bomb scene around the time of the explosion. His fingerprints also match those found on a container used for holding explosive seized during the first police raid.

Media have speculated on a connection between the bombing at the shrine -- popular with tourists, especially Chinese -- and the suspected mistreatment of 109 ethnic Uighur that Thailand sent to China in July.

The 85 men and 24 women were from a group of around 350 who were being held in Thai immigration centers.

Around 180 had earlier been sent to Turkey, which welcomes Uighur as its own as they are among a number of Turkic tribes that inhabit a region many Turks call East Turkestan and consider to be part of Central Asia, not China.

Police spokesman Gen. Prawut Thavornsiri has said that the bombing was not related to "international terrorism", but rather to "people smuggling".

"The gang [to which the suspect belongs] is unsatisfied with police arresting illegal entrants," he told a Thai TV channel.

"The suspect had more than 200 fake passports when he was arrested. It is a network that fakes passports and sends the illegal migrants towards third countries."

Xinjiang province, in northwestern China, is populated mostly by ethnic Uighur. There are currently 52 Uighur, mostly men, still detained at immigration centres in southern Thailand.

Narathiwat, the province from which the third suspect hails, is one of three predominantly Malay Muslim provinces in southern Thailand where an insurgency against the central Thai state has been waged for decades.