Site of the Erawan Shrine bombing, Bangkok. Lillian Suwanrumpha/Demotix. All rights reserved.More than a week after Bangkok was rocked by what the Prime Minister called “the worst incident that has ever happened in Thailand”, in which at least 22 people lost their lives and scores were injured after a remotely detonated 3kg pipe bomb went off at a popular Hindu shrine, the country’s authorities are getting nowhere close to solving the whys and whos behind the attack. Caught between sprawling governmental corruption, lack of “CSI technology”, broken CCTV cameras, the absence of any claim of responsibility for the bombing, and armed with only a blurry image of a yellow-shirted male suspect lingering around the Erawan shrine, the Royal Thai Police (RTP) have little to go on. These inherent ambiguities raise significant obstacles to unravelling the implications of the attack, which means that until the RTP uncovers more clues analysts should tread carefully.
Bombings and terrorist attacks have a long history in Thailand, a country that has for decades dealt with two main sources of violence: a bloody separatist insurgency in the Malay-Muslim southernmost Pattani province, and political upheavals stemming from innumerable coups and decades of military rule. What is different about this attack though is the fact that it targeted Bangkok, a city that had so far remained almost unscathed from the strings of attacks rocking the country’s restive deep south. There, at least 50 improvised explosive devices were detonated or defused in May of this year and several pipe bombs were used in 2015. This year’s biggest attack had been a car bomb that wounded seven people when it went off in April on the island of Koh Samui. In Bangkok, no casualties were recorded when two pipe bombs exploded outside a luxury shopping mall in early February, in this year’s previously most significant attack in the Thai capital.
According to analysts, the 17 August bombing could have been perpetrated either by anti-government radicals, Muslim extremists fighting for autonomy, renegade elements from the country’s powerful military or even by outside actors (such as ISIS, Al Qaeda, Turkey’s ultranationalist Grey Wolves, or regional groups such as Jemaah Islamiyah). However, judging from the scarce information available there are serious issues with almost every theory.
