Bangkok (AsiaNews) - Thai police are hunting four alleged perpetrators of the August 17 bombing which caused 20 victims. Another man was arrested three days ago (see photo). One of the main suspects is a woman of 26, Wanna Suansant, the owner of an apartment in Bangkok, where investigators have found traces of materials useful for building a bomb: fertilizers containing urea, sodium bicarbonate, TNT , plastic containers and metal fuses.
Contacted by AFP, the woman - a Muslim and from the south of the country – said she had been living in Turkey with her husband for three months and was "shocked" at being accused of involvement in the attack, which occurred at the Erawan temple in central Bangkok . Wanna added she had not set foot in the apartment for about a year and had no idea who used it in the meantime. The police have since ordered the women not to release further statements to the press.
Three arrest warrants have been issued against unidentified men: a foreigner who rented Wanna’s apartment; the man in yellow shirt recorded by the cameras near the site of the explosion; the man who appeared on national television CCTV while carrying a bomb, which exploded at a pier of Bangkok port, a few minutes after the attack on the temple Erawan. This second bomb caused no deaths or injuries.
Meanwhile, police in the capital have pocketed three million baht (about 85 thousand dollars) reward despite there being no developments in the investigation. After the arrest of a suspect on 29 August, Somyot Poompanmoung, millionaire and national police chief, decided to distribute the money up for grabs from the authorities to his agents. A similar sum had been collected from the local population for anyone who could provide clues to the capture of the culprits. Somyot did not reveal whether the money collected also originated from this collection.
The ransom was pocketed although four of the five suspects are still at large and despite the fact that the nationality of the only suspect arrested to date after three days, has not yet been defined. The authorities are harshly criticized for not having achieved any concrete results in two weeks since the attack, described as "the worst ever" by Premier Prayut Chan o-cha. The trend of confused investigations has led some critics to doubt that the attack is a deliberate military ploy to increase the need for security and to reaffirm their grip on power.