Last Thursday, Thai television stations interrupted programmes to broadcast live footage of what appeared to be the immediate aftermath of an attempt to assassinate the Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.
Millions of viewers were glued to their sets watching bomb squad officers defuse a car, packed with dozens of kilograms of explosives, parked outside Thaksin’s Bangkok residence.
The driver, army Lieutenant Thawatchai Klinchana, was arrested. Within hours the deputy head of the Internal Security Operation Command, General Pallop Pinmanee, was fired and Thaksin said several unnamed senior officers, including some no longer active, were involved in the plot.
One week later the investigation into the assassination attempt, rather than being solved, is mired in a lack of progress and confusion. On Monday the police released a video of Thawatchai confessing and apologising. Officials said it was unequivocal. But Thaksin critics said it proved nothing.
Meanwhile, no charges have been laid against Pallop, whose only link to Thawatchai appears to be that the latter was once the general’s driver. None of the other alleged accomplices have been detained.
There are also contradictory claims about whether the explosives were even rigged to detonate, with the balance of evidence suggesting they could not have exploded, let alone devastate everything in a 0,8km radius, as some investigators said initially.
A police spokesperson said progress was being made but that ”it would take time” to tie up all the loose ends. He declined to give any details.
The discrepancies in the investigation are not going unnoticed by the public. In one opinion poll, conducted by Bangkok University earlier this week, 49,8% of those polled, in an admittedly anti-Thaksin city, said they believed the incident was staged.
In another poll, conducted by Assumption University, 47% of respondents said it was too early to say definitively to pass judgement.
Nothing in Thailand happens in a vacuum when Thaksin is involved, and the consequence of the assassination plot has been to polarise an already deeply divided nation and deepen the political crisis that has mired the country in uncertainty for the past few months.
Thaksin supporters are insisting the attempt on their leader’s life was a genuine attempt, by an increasingly desperate opposition, to eliminate the prime minister.
The opposition, conversely, are accusing the prime minister of resorting to increasingly desperate tactics to shore up his fragile position, ahead of a general election expected in November.
In an editorial yesterday, the Bangkok Post newspaper said: ”Until all of the perpetrators and masterminds of the alleged assassination plot are accounted for and successfully prosecuted, Thaksin and the national police force will be put to the ultimate test in the court of public opinion.
”It may seem unfair, but their actions will inevitably be judged on their far-from-impressive track record of credibility, honesty and public accountability.”
This alludes to the various scandals, such as Thaksin’s immediate relatives selling shares in the family Shin Corp conglomerate without paying tax, and the prime minister’s steady erosion of the power of institutions meant to provide checks and balances to the executive.
It was this perceived lack of honesty and public accountability which prompted the opposition to boycott an April 2 general election Thaksin called as a referendum on himself. Thaksin won a landslide but the courts nullified the result and purged the election commission after the extremely influential king intervened.
A new commission is in the process of being selected and a new election is expected in mid-November.
Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, said initially he ”kept an open mind” about the assassination plot. ”But one would expect there to be progress in a few days and there hasn’t been any,” he told Guardian Unlimited. ”So it’s looking increasingly like a hoax.”
Dr Titinan believes that for the sake of restoring national unity Thaksin will have to resign, as he promised to do in April but then changed his mind.
”This week has shown that Thailand will never move forward while Thaksin is around,” he said. ”Everything is so politicised now, the nation will only be able to rebuild once he has left office.” – Guardian Unlimited Â