A policeman inspects the cordoned-off site of a bomb blast at the popular Erawan shrine in the heart of Bangkok’s tourist and commercial centre, on August 18, 2015.
BANGKOK: Thailand’s prime minister said Tuesday that a second foreign suspect had been arrested at a border checkpoint with Cambodia over last month’s Bangkok shrine bomb that killed 20 people.
“He has been arrested at Sa Kaeo checkpoint,” Prayut Chan-O-Cha told reporters, referring to the Thai side of the border, adding “he is a main suspect and a foreigner”.
“We have arrested one more, he is not a Thai,” Prayut told reporters after a weekly cabinet meeting.
Asked whether he is thought to be the person who planted the bomb at the Erawan shrine in Bangkok’s busy Chidlom shopping district, he replied: “We are interrogating. He is a main suspect and a foreigner.”
The motive for the blast – Thailand’s worst single mass-casualty attack – remains shrouded in mystery.
Suspicion has variously fallen on Thailand’s bitter political rivals, organised criminal gangs, Islamist militants, rebels in the kingdom’s strife-torn south and sympathisers of refugees from China’s Uighur minority.
Security officials on Saturday arrested a man 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 Monday for two more suspects, a Thai woman and a man of unknown nationality.-AFP