Thailand says soldiers, police behind bombs

Bangkok, Jan 4: Thailand's army-appointed government admitted for the first time today that dissident soldiers and police may have been behind New Year's Eve bombs that killed three people in Bangkok.

However, it failed to provide any evidence to back up its claims, which most Thais are interpreting as implicating exiled former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a September 19 coup, and his allies still in the country.

Defence Minister General Boonrod Somtat said the post-coup government continued to rule out foreign terrorist groups as well as Muslim militants fighting Bangkok's rule in the far south, despite some similarities in style.

''So, there are only those inside the country left -- the civilians, police and armed forces both in khaki and green,'' he told reporters.

''Intelligence puts 90 per cent weight on political issues. There is a political group in which a few people have the potential to do such a thing,'' he said, without elaborating.

''People who can handle this involve civilians, police and military officers.'' Thaksin -- a former police lieutenant-colonel -- has denied any involvement in the bombings, which knocked 3 per cent off the stock market at the start of 2007 trade as foreign and domestic investors feared another a year of political upheaval.

The United States, Britain and Australia issued travel advisories in the aftermath of the bombs and diplomats said a Foreign Ministry briefing today had failed to provide much by way of reassurance or answers.

No Light Shed

''There was no evidence whatsoever,'' one diplomat said. ''It was not exactly enlightening.'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Kitti Wasinondh told a news conference that investigators were struggling to come up with witnesses and that much of their work was centred on video surveillance tapes and forensics.

''It might be some time for the results of that to come,'' he said.

General Saprang Kalayanamitr, the most outspoken member of the Council for National Security (CNS), as the coup leaders now call themselves, said the authorities had security camera footage from two of the bomb sites but no clear suspects.

''The people who did it must have been trained for that, or familiar with it. Gangsters, mafia or well-known people were not able to do it,'' he told a Bangkok radio station.

Security analysts said it was impossible to rule out completely the groups behind the campaign of violence in the three southernmost provinces, which kicked off with a raid on an army barracks on January 4 2004.

More than 1,800 people have died in daily shootings and bombings, but the violence has never moved outside the immediate vicinity of the Malay-speaking provinces of Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani, which Bangkok annexed a century ago.

Although many of the bombs in the far south have used ammonium nitrate fertiliser as explosive -- as did the Bangkok bombs -- analysts said their wide geographical spread across the capital was very different.

''This has to be in some fashion linked to the former regime -- but that's such an enormous pool of people,'' said security analyst Brian Dougherty of Hill and Associates in Bangkok.

Reuters