Death Sentence for Two Bangkok Bombing Attackers
A Bangkok criminal court has sentenced two men to death over the 2015 Erawan Shrine bombing that killed 20 people, after a trial that dragged on for a decade.
- A criminal court in Bangkok handed down death sentences on June 11 to two men convicted over the 2015 Erawan Shrine bombing.
- The attack on 17 August 2015 killed 20 people and injured more than 120, including foreign tourists.
- The trial opened in 2016 and dragged on for a full decade, with repeated delays.
- The defense has announced an appeal, and the convicted men have 30 days to file it.
A verdict that took ten years to arrive landed in a courtroom in the Thai capital, yet the event behind it crossed the borders of Southeast Asia long ago. On 11 June, a criminal court in Bangkok sentenced two men to death over the August 2015 bombing of the Erawan Shrine, one of the deadliest acts of terrorism in modern Thai history. For readers in Serbia, who increasingly travel to that very region and for whom Bangkok has become a familiar transit point toward Asian destinations, the ruling is a reminder of how slowly, and how unpredictably, cases tied to international terrorism tend to close.
The Erawan Shrine, set in the very heart of Bangkok’s commercial district, is one of the most visited places of worship in the city, a site through which thousands of devotees and tourists pass every day. It was precisely that density of people that made the attack on 17 August 2015 so devastating. An explosive device was detonated in the evening hours, when the crowd around the shrine was at its largest. Twenty people were killed, more than 120 were injured, and foreign tourists were among the dead, including a group of visitors from China. Images of the wrecked plaza traveled the world at the time and became a symbol of how vulnerable one of the region’s busiest tourist capitals could be.
Why did the trial last a full decade?
The case against the two defendants opened back in 2016 and was postponed many times after that, turning the proceedings into one of the longest terrorism trials in Thai history. Security experts link the attack to retaliation for the deportation of more than a hundred people from Thailand a month before the explosion, giving the event a clear geopolitical dimension that weighed on the process from the start. The evidentiary procedure was complicated, and questions over the identity and motives of the accused followed the trial all the way to the verdict.
Human rights activists warned over the years about the possibility of political influence on the outcome, which added further weight to the ruling in the eyes of the international public. Thailand was, throughout that period, under scrutiny from organizations monitoring the treatment of the suspects and the conditions under which a case of this scale was conducted.
What comes after the verdict?
A death sentence does not mean the end of the legal road. The defense immediately announced an appeal, arguing that the court had failed to take into account a range of circumstances important to the case. The convicted men have 30 days to file it, which means the case, already a decade before the courts, is most likely to keep moving through higher instances.
The verdict produced a turbulent moment in the courtroom. One of the convicted men, according to agencies, shouted that he did not accept the decision: “I don’t accept this, I didn’t do anything wrong.” The reaction captured the sentiment that has trailed the entire process, divided assessments of whether, after ten years, the truth about the Erawan attack has truly been established. The question now left open is this: will the appeal bring a final legal full stop, or will the Erawan Shrine case remain without real resolution into the next decade as well?
