Thailand: Arrestee's fingerprints on bomb equipment

By Max Constant

BANGKOK

Thai police said Wednesday that the fingerprints of a man arrested on the Thai border with Cambodia match those found on a container seized during a Bangkok raid used for holding bomb ingredients.

Police spokesman Gen. Prawut Thavornsiri said in a televised statement that the fingerprints were the same as those found on the equipment seized during a weekend raid on a Bangkok suburban apartment.

Saturday's raid yielded the arrest of a male suspect, a large amount of bomb-making material, including ball bearings similar to those used in the bomb which killed 20 people in central Bangkok Aug. 17, and around 200 fake Turkish passports.

"We can confirm that this man is directly involved with the bomb material," Thavornsiri said.

The man arrested Tuesday is now considered a prime suspect in the bombing by the Thai authorities, but they are yet to clarify if he is the man in a yellow shirt pictured on CCTV footage -- despite an initial statement to that effect from the country's junta leader-cum prime minister Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha.

On Wednesday, police chief Gen. Somyot Pumpanmuang told Voice TV channel that he was "not sure" if the suspect arrested near the Cambodian border was the yellow-shirted man filmed leaving a bag at a Hindu Shrine in central Bangkok on Aug. 17 prior to the explosion.

The ensuing blast killed 20 people, among them 14 foreign tourists, and injured over 130 others.

Media have speculated on a connection between the bombing at a shrine -- popular with tourists, especially Chinese -- and Thailand sending 109 ethnic Uighur to China, from a group of around 350 who were being held in Thai immigration centers.

Around 180 had earlier been sent to Turkey, which welcomes Uighur as its own as they are among a number of Turkic tribes that inhabit a region many Turks call East Turkestan and consider to be part of Central Asia, not China.

Gen. Thavornsiri has said that the bombing was not related to "international terrorism," but rather to "people smuggling".

"The gang [to which the suspect belongs] is unsatisfied with police arresting illegal entrants," he told a Thai TV channel.

"The suspect had more than 200 fake passports when he was arrested. It is a network that fakes passports and sends the illegal migrants towards third countries."

Deputy-police chief Chaktip Chaijinda was quoted by a Bangkok Post journalist as saying Wednesday that the man arrested Tuesday carried a Chinese passport with Xinjiang as the birthplace, but -- given the large amounts of forged passports discovered in the apartment -- its authenticity has still to to be verified.

Xinjiang province, in northwestern China, is populated mostly by ethnic Uighur.

There are currently 52 Uighur, mostly men, still detained at immigration centres in southern Thailand.