Ekip
27 June 2016•Update: 29 June 2016
By Max Constant
BANGKOK
Thai police have linked a recent car bombing in an insurgency-plagued majority Muslim province to an explosion at a shopping mall in a tourist island last year, local media reported Monday.
Pol. Col. Kong-ath Suwankham, police chief of Sungai Kolok municipality in Narathiwat, told the Bangkok Post that Sunday’s blast “is believed to be the work of some of the attackers involved in the car bombing at the Central Festival shopping mall in Koh Samui last year”.
On Sunday morning, a pick-up truck exploded near a military base in Sungai Kolok and left two passers-by slightly injured, and damaged two parked motorbikes and around nine vending stalls.
In April 2015, seven people -- including a 12-year-old Italian girl -- were wounded in a car bombing in an underground mall parking lot in Koh Samui, located some 500 kilometers (311 miles) north of the three majority Muslim provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala.
Suwankham said that a man named Hasueming Puta, who police suspect was involved in the Koh Samui attack, had repainted the pick-up used in Sunday’s blast a bronze color. Puta was also allegedly the getaway driver for the man who parked the explosive-laden pick-up near the military base in Sungai Kolok.
“The vehicle was originally white but was repainted for the attack by Hasueming Puta. He has so far escaped arrest,” the police chief told the Post.
Thailand’s junta, which has been ruling the country since a May 2014 coup, had initially linked the Koh Samui attack to the tense national political situation and to opposition by some groups against the military regime.
More recently, however, Thai authorities have recognized that the bombing could be linked to the violence plaguing the far south since 2004 -- particularly to an incident in March 2015 when seven soldiers killed four young Muslim villagers.
An investigation led by military officers, civil servants and religious and community leaders later concluded that those killed were not connected with any insurgency movement and that the weapons supposedly found at the site did not belong to them.
The committee also recommended that the seven soldiers involved be tried.
Thailand’s deputy prime minister and defense minister, Gen. Prawit Wongsuwan, vowed in April 2015 that the seven soldiers would face justice.
“I believe the officers were doing their best, but this operation took place at night, which means there might have been other factors, leading to mistakes. However, all of them will have to undergo the judicial process,” he had told The Nation newspaper.
At the time, Gen. Prakarn Chonlayuth, commander of the Fourth Army supervising the south, publicly apologized for the killings, and pledged to launch a disciplinary procedure against the seven soldiers in addition to the legal proceedings.
Since then a criminal case has been filed against the seven at the Pattani provincial court, but some family members of the victims have expressed doubt about the process.
“I felt better when the military officers apologized,” the Post quoted the father of one of the deceased young men as saying. “But in court, the officers claimed my son was a wrongdoer and had a gun. This made me doubt about the fairness of the process.”
The southern insurgency is rooted in a century-old ethno-cultural conflict between Malay Muslims living in the southern region and the Thai central state where Buddhism is considered the de-facto national religion.
Armed insurgent groups were formed in the 1960s after the then-military dictatorship tried to interfere in Muslim schools, but the insurgency faded in the 1990s.
Since a rejuvenated armed movement emerged in 2004, violence has continued unabated, leaving more than 6,200 dead and around 11,000 injured.
