Arrest does not answer Bangkok bomb questions

The breakthrough in the Thai blast case has been a glimpse of hope, but more answers must follow, writes Jeremy Walden-Schertz

Policemen search a room on the outskirts of Bangkok that is believed to have been rented by the suspect. Rungroj Yongrit / AFP

Bangkok breathed a collective sigh of relief over the weekend as police investigating the Erawan Shrine bombing two weeks ago made their first arrest. The investigation is far from complete, but a break in the case – any break – was welcome news.

The man detained was initially named as Adem Karadag, a 28-year-old Turkish national, although authorities cautioned that it might be a false identity. In the Saturday-morning raid at a northern Bangkok apartment, police found as many as 250 false passports, which are readily available on the Thai black market. They also found bomb-making components including 0.5cm-diameter ball bearings similar to those used in the Erawan bombing.

Local media reports indicated that the man may be an accomplice of the alleged bomber, who was captured on CCTV leaving a bulky backpack at the shrine before the explosion. Authorities have said that there may be as many as 10 conspirators, possibly including Thai nationals, although there has been little substantiation for those claims.

While the arrest has been a glimmer of hope in the case, there are still far too many unanswered questions. Before Saturday, the investigation had often taken on an almost farcical tone, albeit a grim joke when associated with the terrorist attack that killed 20, injured more than 100 and damaged a revered Hindu shrine.

Shortly after the attack, Gen Prayut Chan-ocha, the prime minister who took power in a May 2014 coup, posited that the Thai investigators should learn from his favourite TV show, the US cop drama Blue Bloods. Thai police, he said, were perhaps not quite as good investigators as the Hollywood actors.

Warning posters across the city purported to show the bomber, wearing the distinctive yellow shirt and sports arm bands seen in the CCTV footage, but were superimposed with the face of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 22-year-old Boston bomber who is in a US prison cell facing the death penalty.

More substantively, the conflicting messages from various Thai authorities have contributed to a sense of unease in the capital. The subject seen in the CCTV images was quickly identified as a foreigner, which is a crucial distinction given Thailand’s decade-long political turmoil and occasional politically-motivated violence. Yet within five days of the bombing, a government spokesman ruled out the possibility of foreign terrorist groups being behind the attack.

After the arrest on Saturday, Thailand’s police chief, Somyot Pumpanmuang, told the media that the suspect was a foreigner, but not connected to an international terrorist network. The bombing, he said, was related to a “personal feud”, but he did not offer any details.

The police work behind the raid was apparently a model of the professionalism that Thai authorities should demonstrate. The press conference that night, however, repeated the same pattern of errors seen before. Authorities released photos of the detained man and the bomb materials, as well as a photo of what appeared to be a suicide vest. Very quickly it emerged that the vest was neither found during the raid, nor associated with the detained man.

Thailand’s military-led government took power based on the rationale of public security. The reassertion of the military into politics, and the abrogation of Thai citizens’ political rights, has been deeply controversial, yet in Bangkok the coup was widely welcomed as a stabilising force. Regardless of the dubious merits of a military-led government, security must be a litmus test.

The prevailing theory has been that the attack may have been related to Thailand’s deportation to China of 109 Uighurs in July. That theory was reinforced one after the bombing, when IHS Jane’s analyst Anthony Davis told the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand (FCCT) that the most probable culprits may be associated with a Turkish militant organisation, the Grey Wolves. The ultranationalist group has been banned in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan for alleged terrorist acts.

Davis associated the Grey Wolves with the deportation of the Uighurs because of a pan-Islamic sentiment and an ethnic kinship, in which the Chinese minority Uighurs are referred to as “eastern Turkmen”. The FCCT address was joined by other speculative theories about domestic politics and, improbably, US involvement.

There has been a consistent thread of suspicion about the involvement of Turkish nationals in the attack. The UK newspaper The Times reported on August 21 that police were looking for a man named Mohamed Museyin who was using a fake Turkish passport, but the report was later disputed by Thai authorities.

On Sunday, Ankara’s embassy in Bangkok denied that the detained man was a citizen of Turkey. The man refuses to say anything to police.

The breakthrough on Saturday has been a glimpse of hope, particularly given the capture of more bomb components that might have been used for another atrocity. For Bangkok, this attack has shaken confidence. The arrest has restored some of that strength, but more answers must follow.

Jeremy Walden-Schertz is a former comment editor of The National and a recent graduate of the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego