Motorcycle bomb at Bangkok shrine kills at least 12

At least 19 people were killed and more than 120 injured when a bomb exploded Monday, August 17, outside a religious shrine in the Thai capital, in its deadliest single assault in recent years.

The blast, which detonated near the Erawan Shrine, a Hindu place of worship and popular tourist attraction, destroyed several motorcycles.

An Associated Press reporter at the scene said he saw one body and body parts, and two people taken into ambulances.

The shrine sits at the foot of the five-star Grand Hyatt Erawan hotel and is surrounded by a string of large hotels and malls that draw tens of thousands of visitors each day. For extra luck, worshipers pay respect and money to the shrine’s Thai dancers.

Foreigners are among the casualties, said Maj Gen. Weerachon Sukhontapatipak, a Thai government spokesman.

It’s too early to say who orchestrated the attack, Somyot said. Photo credit: J Aaron Farr.

No one has claimed responsibility for the bombing at a popular Hindu shrine that killed more than a dozen people and injured more than 100.

The Nation TV channel quoted Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha as saying the government would set up a “war room” to co-ordinate its response.

Marko Cunningham, a New Zealand paramedic working with a Bangkok ambulance service, said the blast had left a two-metre-wide crater.

Thai Rath TV reported that one of the injured was a foreign national.

Authorities initially cleared the area to search for additional explosives but none were found, Reuters said. Bomb squad members in blast suits responded, and an officer announced over a loudspeaker, “The situation is still not safe”.

Foreigners expressed alarm tinged with a sense of deja vu after a bomb tore through central Bangkok on Monday night in a devastating return of violence to the “Land of Smiles”.

“I think this is likely to affect [tourism] more”, said Pierce Haney, manager of the Southeast Asia division of Easy Tours, a Texas travel agency that helps plan visits to Thailand, adding that “the past bombings have been sort of failures, but this one, they built a pretty decent bomb”.

The bomb could be linked to the Malay Muslim separatist insurgency in the far south of the country, which has seen over 6,500 people lose their lives since 2004.

“I thought things had been getting stable over there”, said Haney, whose company has been sending Americans to Thailand since 2006.

Bangkok has been relatively peaceful since a military coup ousted a civilian government in May last year after several months of sometimes violent political protests against the previous government.

“They are just garbage bags”, he said.

In April, a auto bomb exploded at a shopping mall on the resort island of Samui, injuring seven people. The shrine is so revered that Thanakorn Pakdeepol, a mentally ill man, was beaten to death in 2006 by two bystanders after they witnessed him vandalizing the statue.