Scores injured in bomb blast at Bangkok hospital

Bomb blast wounds at least 24 on third anniversary of Thai military coup.

A hospital patient is escorted to safety after a bomb blast at the military-run Phramongkutklao Hospital in Bangkok. Rungroj Yongrit / EPA

BANGKOK // A bomb exploded at a military-run hospital in Bangkok on Monday, wounding at least 24 people on the third anniversary of a military coup.

There was no claim of responsibility for the blast at the King Mongkut hospital - also called Phramongkutklao Hospital, which is used by soldiers and their families and retired military officers.

The blast struck near the VIP section as patients and their families waited for prescriptions, shattering glass and sending smoke into the corridors.

“It was a bomb. We found the pieces that were used to make the bomb,” said Kamthorn Aucharoen, commander of the police’s explosive ordnance team said. Mr Kamthorn said it was not clear who was behind the attack.

“Right now, authorities are checking out closed circuit cameras,” he said.

Sansern Kaewkamnerd, a government spokesman, said 24 people had been injured, most of them by flying glass.

While it was not immediately clear who was behind the blast, Thailand has a long history of bomb attacks on symbolic dates carried out by militant political factions or separatists linked to an insurgency in the Muslim-majority south.

Regardless of the motive, the blast will raise the political temperature in Thailand where violence had declined under the military’s stranglehold.

Police are already hunting suspects behind two other small blasts in recent weeks, but have given conflicting and contradictory information over the devices and likely suspects.

Deputy national police chief General Srivara Rangsibrahmanakul said the bomb had been hidden in a container by the entrance of a pharmacy. A battery and wires had been found at the scene, he said adding that the bomb “was likely to be in a package”.

Monday was the third anniversary of a military coup that toppled a democratically elected government and ended months of unrest, including sometimes deadly street demonstrations.

Since the coup, the junta, known as the National Council for Peace and Order, has clamped down on dissent and ramped up prosecutions under sedition and royal defamation laws.

The military has always played a prominent role in Thai life but since the coup it has become embedded in society with military men more entrenched than under previous governments.

The military government has acknowledged it wants to weaken political parties and maintain permanent influence over elected governments, partly through a new constitution approved by the king last month.

An election is due by the end of next year.

The blast comes weeks after a car bomb at a shopping centre in the province of Pattani, near Thailand’s border with Malaysia, which wounded 61 people, and which authorities blamed on Muslim insurgents.

The far south of Thailand, which includes Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat provinces, is home to a long-running separatist insurgency. Earlier on Monday, a bomb went off in Yala, one of the Muslim-majority provinces in the restive south, wounding military officers.

* Reuters and Agence France-Presse