Bangkok shrine bombers tried to blow up pier packed with Chinese tourists, Thai police say

The perpetrators of last year’s deadly explosion at a Bangkok shrine originally chose a pier packed with Chinese tourists as their primary target and had amassed enough chemicals to make 10 equally powerful bombs, the chief of Thailand’s police bomb squad said.

A bomb planted at the Erawan Shrine on August 17 killed 20 people and turned a popular tourist site into a scene of carnage.

Another device, which was left at a crowded pier on Bangkok’s Chao Phraya river but failed to explode, might have inflicted much greater casualties, said a leading security analyst.

Bomb squad chief Police Colonel Kamthorn Auicharoen’s disclosures bolster a widely held theory that the perpetrators of the shrine bombing were trying to kill Chinese tourists.

The Thai police have maintained that the motive for the Erawan bombing was Thailand’s earlier crackdown on human smuggling networks.

But many analysts, diplomats and even Thai officials say the August 17 bombing was likely an act of revenge for Thailand’s deportation to China of more than 100 Uyghur Muslims in July.

Acknowledging that Chinese tourists were intentionally targeted could dent one of Thailand’s biggest industries. A record 7.9 million Chinese visited the kingdom in 2015, or more than a quarter of the 28 million tourists that year.