Aide: Thai Red Shirt security chief shot in head/Thai Forces Move on Protesters as Tension Grows

Aide: Thai Red Shirt security chief shot in head
By THANYARAT DOKSONE
Copyright by The Associated Press
Thursday, May 13, 2010; 9:24 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/13/AR2010051300487.html?hpid=topnews


BANGKOK -- A renegade army officer accused of marshaling a paramilitary force among Thailand's Red Shirt protesters was shot in the head Thursday, apparently by a sniper, an aide said.

The aide who answered Maj. Gen. Khattiya Sawasdiphol's mobile phone described the injury as "severe." The Associated Press called Khattiya's phone after several gunshots and explosions were heard in central Bangkok late Thursday from the vicinity of the area being occupied by the protesters.

"Seh Daeng was shot in the head," said the aide, referring to Khattiya by his nickname. The aide hung up without identifying himself.

It was not possible to verify the aide's claim that Khattiya was shot by a sniper. Calls to police and army spokesmen seeking comment were not answered.

Several Thai media outlets also reported that Khattiya was shot and taken to a hospital. Khattiya is a renegade army major general whom the government has labeled a "terrorist" and a mastermind behind violence from anti-government protesters.

The report of Khattiya's shooting came after sounds of gunfire and at least four explosions, and expectation that security forces could launch a crackdown.

It was not clear who was shooting, but the sounds came after the government said it will impose a military lockdown on the area to evict the thousands of protesters.

Khattiya, who helped construct the barricades paralyzing downtown Bangkok, was accused of creating a paramilitary force among the anti-government protesters and had vowed to battle against the army if it should launch a crackdown.

He was suspended from the army and his actions made him a fugitive from justice. Yet he has wandered freely through the protest zone, signing autographs just yards (meters) from security forces keeping watch over the protesters.

A reporter for TNN television said electricity went out late Thursday in the Red Shirt protest zone in Rajprasong, a posh area of shopping malls, hotels and upscale apartments that they have occupied since April 3 in the intractable political crisis gripping the country.

The Red Shirts, many from the rural poor, are demanding an immediate dissolution of Parliament. They believe Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's coalition government came to power illegitimately through manipulation of the courts and the backing of the powerful military.



Thai Forces Move on Protesters as Tension Grows
By SETH MYDANS and THOMAS FULLER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 14, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/15/world/asia/15thai.html?hp


BANGKOK — Thai troops fired on anti-government protesters on Friday, turning parts of downtown Bangkok into a battlefield as the military used gunfire and tear gas to try to seal off a broad area where demonstrators have camped for weeks.

As of late afternoon, one person had been killed and 22 injured in the day’s clashes. The injured included a cameraman for a French television station and a Thai photographer, both of whom were shot.

The protesters seized and vandalized several military vehicles, setting at least one truck on fire and cheering as a column of soldiers with riot shields looked on. Plumes of black and brown smoke rose into the air from burning vehicles and tires.

Gunfire and explosions could be heard at the nearby American Embassy, which shut down and offered voluntary relocation to employees who live near the protest area. Other nearby embassies also closed as well as schools and businesses.

If it is not contained, the violence could widen into the kind of broader conflict the government has sought to avoid. Protest leaders have said that if the military tries to disperse them, supporters elsewhere in the country may stage similar street protests or take over government buildings.

No matter how the paralyzing two-month protest ends, deep divisions and tensions are likely to persist in a country that is increasingly divided between its poor and its urban elite. Over the past four years, political and personal enmities have hardened, making reconciliation even more difficult.

Though most of Bangkok was quiet, roads in the conflict area were nearly empty, sealed off by soldiers who were building roadblocks with sandbags and coils of razor wire.

Troops in battle gear crouched behind traffic barriers, pointing their rifles at bands of motorcycle riders who form a mobile force for the protesters. Other troops ran crouching along a highway overpass as traffic slowly moved behind them. Armed soldiers on motorcycles swept through the streets in columns.

Some bystanders heckled the soldiers from sidewalks and the windows of office buildings.

Inside the barricaded protest area, leaders of the so-called red shirt movement addressed thousands of supporters who have camped there for weeks, vowing to hold their ground and resist any military incursion. They have been demanding the dissolution of Parliament and new elections.

“They are tightening a noose on us but we will fight to the end, brothers and sisters,” a protest leader, Nattawut Saikua, told the crowd.

Another leader, Kokeaw Pikulthong, issued what appeared to be a veiled threat to the government. In the event of a crackdown, he said in a telephone interview, protesters might be forced to break into shopping malls “to survive.”

The protest area, which covers about a square mile surrounding a major intersection, is becoming filthy and fly-infested, with piles of garbage accumulating since the government cut off waste collection and deliveries of water for the rally’s storage tanks Friday morning.

The deputy governor of Bangkok, Pornthep Techapaiboon, said that portable toilets would remain for sanitary reasons but that the staff who clean them had withdrawn after being assaulted by protesters.

Because of new military checkpoints, the protesters, who sleep on mats on the street, can leave the site if they choose but are not being allowed to return.

At the perimeters, guards poured gasoline over barricades of concrete blocks, tires, barbed wire and sharpened bamboo poles, threatening to set them on fire if attacked. They splashed oil on the street in front of one of the barricades and scattered round pellets to create a slippery dry-land moat.

Protesters attached homemade explosives to the ends of sticks, propping them inside plastic traffic cones before aiming and sending them with a whoosh in the direction of soldiers. They also fired in the direction of military helicopters that hovered overhead.

Some protesters wore motorcycle helmets and carried homemade weapons including bows and arrows, slingshots and sharpened bamboo poles. Some prepared to fling plastic bags filled with pungent fish sauce and hot peppers at soldiers.

Inside the protest area, a man who identified himself as John Redshirt, a disc jockey for an anti-government radio station, watched as men sat on the ground in a makeshift workshop constructing crossbows from lengths of plastic pipe and bamboo.

“We are never scared of the military,” he said in English. “If they come, we have the right to fight back. We can’t just let them kill us and do nothing.”

A nurse at an aid station inside the camp, Jenny Tan, 56, spoke of the fear of impending violence with tears in her eyes.

“We are afraid for the soldiers too,” she said. “The soldiers are our sons. We are mother, father, sister, brother. So we don’t want any of them to die. Very, very sad. Very, very sad for Thailand.”

The general rankled both the government, by joining the so-called red-shirt movement, and many protest leaders, for his refusal to back down and for what they say they suspect was his role in the violence that has taken two dozen lives since the protests began in mid-March. In the interview on Thursday, he described other leaders of the protesters as cowardly “idiots.”

Nonetheless, the general had assumed control of security for the protesters, placing his own black-shirted paramilitary fighters at entrances in the makeshift barriers around their encampment, and he claimed the loyalty of a small but intense group of protesters.

Although the government called him the main impediment to peace and suspended him without pay, he was allowed to move freely, exposing the impotence of the authorities here.

“I deny!” he cried in English, with a laugh, when asked in an interview on Sunday about the dozens of bombings that have set Bangkok on edge and about the mysterious black-shirted killers who escalated the violence on April 10 that killed 26 soldiers and civilians. “No one ever saw me.”

The general’s last words before being shot were, “The military cannot get in here.”