mobanmarketBangkok: Footage emerged on Saturday of the moment a bomb exploded in a Bangkok mall as the city hosted a major summit, the device apparently hidden inside a cuddly toy animal.
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There were nine successful or attempted bomb blasts on Friday throughout Bangkok which left four wounded as the city hosted a regional summit attended by top diplomats, including US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
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Footage showed an explosion in a shopping mall minutes from the summit venue in the early hours of Friday morning, after it was apparently planted by a man dressed in a student’s uniform about 12 hours earlier.
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The man, wearing a fedora and face mask, entered a store in Siam Square mall at around 3.30pm on Thursday, according to time stamps on the footage obtained by AFP.
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Milling around the store, he stopped at a shelf full of cuddly toy seals and polar bears and fiddled with one of them for a few seconds before placing it back on the shelf.
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The next video recordings showed an explosion in the store originating from the shelf around 4:45 am on Friday morning, which caused a fire and a swirl of smoke as the store’s sprinkler system was activated.
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No one was injured and police confirmed the bomb blast.
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“The staff from the … store filed a complaint with the police about the blast yesterday,” Colonel Thammanoon Boonruang told AFP Saturday, declining to comment on whether it was one of the nine explosions authorities confirmed.
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The store remained closed on Saturday.
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Speculation swirled in Thailand about the motive behind the bombings, with many linking them to retaliation from the insurgency-hit south for the recent arrest of a rebel suspect who was left in a coma after arriving at a notorious army camp.
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A preliminary army-led probe showed that Abdulloh Esormusor, 34, could have been suffocated.
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Thailand has a grim history of political violence, and remains deeply divided after a controversial March election which returned junta chief Prayut Chan-O-Cha to power as a civilian premier.
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Its three southernmost provinces bordering Malaysia, which are predominantly Muslim-Malay, are also in a grip of a 15-year conflict, where a shadowy rebel group has agitated for more autonomy outside of the Buddhist-majority Thai state.
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So far, two men linked to the conflict-hit region were arrested hours after wires and ball bearings were found in an inactive device outside Thai police headquarters late Thursday.
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But police said it was “too early” to clearly tie them to the rebellion.
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