Bangkok Supermarket Blasted With Anti-Tank Rocket by Phairath Khampha 27 December 2001 Thai police who investigated an anti-tank rocket attack on a Bangkok building containing the office of the Israeli airline El Al said the blast was unrelated to events in the Middle East. Police said the most likely target was a neighbouring branch of the Tesco Lotus supermarket. The grocery chain had been the target of several bombing attacks since July. Gunmen in Thailand fired on the Tesco Lotus supermarket in the second attack on the chain the same week. The attacks were over an attempt by the store's management to get rid of a mafia-style gang of Thai soldiers from the premises who were extorting motorcycle taxi operators for huge sums of money. However, the thug that was used by the mafia-type organisation to twice attack Southeast Asia's biggest hypermarket in the centre of the Thai capital despised Western-style capitalism and foreign investment. However, police investigations suggested that the perpetrator was financed by Thai and Chinese businessmen to wreak havoc on stores with Western-dominated ownership, according to his own file records which were retrieved by police. There are no reports of deaths or injuries, although one policeman was injured during a standoff with the gunman after a grenade was thrown at them. The gunman died in an explosion believed to have accidentally been set of by himself. Bangkok police chief Anon Piromkaeu said the attack appeared to be an act of intimidation as part of an ongoing business conflict. Police said they found an M-72 anti-tank rocket launcher dumped in a refuse bin by an entrance to the 15-storey Manorom building shortly after the explosion. Investigators said the rocket hit the Tesco Lotus supermarket, causing some damage, before striking the fourth floor of Manorom where it exploded, causing minor damage and smashing windows. The El Al office is on the 14th floor of the Manorom building. Maimed and killed In July, a bomb in a shopping trolley killed one of Tesco's employees and injured a male customer. Two men were arrested at the scene. The men said they worked for a security firm which had recently lost its contract to guard Tesco's 30 supermarkets in Thailand. Earlier that month, a hand grenade maimed a woman in a separate incident. Armed guards Security at Tesco's Thai shops had been greatly increased since the July bombs. The UK company's subsidiary brought in Thai military police officers to keep guard during closing time. Local firms had complained about Tesco's presence and said they cannot compete. Colonel will fight any dismissal order An officer linked to the July Tesco department store bombing and now accused of absenteeism claimed he was unaware the Thai army had been paying him for the previous 12 months. How someone could be so ignorant as to not know they were being paid and still be an army colonel escapes any sort of logic. But this, after all, is Thailand. The army Inspector-General's Department wanted Col Chamnan Masamrant to be discharged. It said he had been absent from duty for more than 12 months since he left to run the security firm that organised the July bombing of the Tesco department store. Col Chamnan, whom police charged with bombing the Samut Prakan Tesco Lotus superstore in June, said he did not deserve dismissal. He said he had resigned before he left and that his letter was signed off by then-army chief Gen Chettha Thanajaro. He would seek justice from army chief Gen Surayud Chulanont should he be dismissed for working for the store while still on active duty. Col Chamnan said Gen Chettha passed his letter on to the Defence Ministry. He was unaware that it had been held up at the Secretariat Department and that his resignation was not complete. He claimed he was unaware that the ministry had been paying him for the last 12 months. The department said he spent office hours running a security firm, telling his superiors that he had quit the army before accepting the security job, and had been absent from work for more than a year. Col Chamnan said his treatment was unfair. "I have never been investigated for these alleged wrongdoings. I may have to seek justice from the army chief." If he was not given justice he would petition the Administrative Court, he said. Police charged Col Chamnan with masterminding the bombing of Tesco Lotus after his firm lost to a rival company a contract to provide security. Understandably, he denied being involved. Tesco in Bangkok attacked again Gunmen in Thailand fired on the Tesco Lotus supermarket in the second attack on the chain the same week. Following the overnight attack on the store in an eastern suburb of Bangkok, police located the gunmen in a house and surrounded them. Reports on local radio said the gunmen had thrown a bomb at the policemen, injuring one. At least three people were believed to be holed up in the house. The man who was suspected of attacking the branch of the British supermarket chain subsequently blew himself up with a hand-grenade after a six-hour stand-off with police. Gunman blown up in standoff The gunman Nopporn Suwanprueksachat, 48, blew himself up in his booby-trap-strewn house during the tense stand-off with the police following the shooting attack on a Tesco-Lotus superstore on Bangna-Trat Road early in the morning. The circumstances surrounding Nopporn's death were unclear, following the usual conflicting and ambiguous police statements on negotiations in progress as the suspect was holed up at his home. The main cause of the controversy was a preliminary autopsy that indicated he had died in an explosion seven hours before the besieging police stormed the house. After a day filled with suspense, police believed Nopporn was also the culprit behind the rocket-grenade attack at the Rama IV branch of Tesco-Lotus earlier in the week. The day-long drama began before 3am when a superstore security guard reported a shooting attack by an unidentified gunman. Deputy national police chief Lt-General Thawatchai Pailee led a team of Samut Prakan detectives to inspect the crime scene. Statements from witnesses indicated the gunman had opened fire from across the road with an automatic rifle at a billboard, the Tesco-Lotus building itself and a guard post, before speeding away in a four-wheel drive vehicle. Thawatchai told reporters that following the inspection of the scene, police had found nine bullet casings. He added that the incident had caused minimal damage. Police said the gunman might have had accomplices. In a second inspection of the crime scene later in the morning, detectives found a mobile telephone left on the kerbside near where the gunman had staged the attack. A subsequent trace found that Nopporn was the owner of the telephone, prompting the Samut Prakan police to surround his home - located in a dead-end lane near Theparak Road - at around 9am. Pol Colonel Amnart Chatakhun, a deputy police commander, asked Nopporn to come out for questioning, but was greeted with five gunshots and a grenade tossed out of the house. Amnart was injured in the incident and rushed to hospital. Thawatchai then called for reinforcements from the Special Weapons and Tactics unit around noon. The SWAT team erected a police barricade and asked reporters and onlookers to stay behind it. An hour later, deputy national police chief General Charnchit Pienlert took charge of negotiations for Nopporn's surrender, according to investigators. A number of police officials later made a series of statements indicating that they were conducting negotiations with Nopporn through a megaphone. If the autopsy report is to be believed, negotiations at this point would have been impossible. Police also said they had asked Nopporn's wife Wandee and their young son to plead for his surrender. Thawatchai later said the wife and son had appealed to him via megaphone, but Nopporn did not respond to their pleas. The commando raid was ordered at 4.50pm, about seven hours after the loud explosion caused by the grenade thrown at Amnart. Pol Maj-General Wichit Samathiwat - chief of the Police Forensic Institute - said Nopporn had died from the impact of the explosion. His body was in pieces, indicating that a bomb might have exploded at close range. Wichit said an autopsy indicated the time of death at around 10am. In a search following the raid, police found a grenade-launcher, the same type used in the attack at Tesco-Lotus' Rama IV branch. They also discovered a hoard of assult weapons and grenade booby traps, believed to have been set by Nopporn to ward off any police raid. National police chief General Sant Sarutanond said the preliminary autopsy and police reports indicated that Nopporn had, perhaps accidentally, killed himself with a grenade soon after he opened fire on Amnart. Nopporn's wife told police that her husband had a history of drug abuse caused by using excessive amounts of painkillers following dental surgery. Focus on motorcycle queue mafia - Soldiers entered store, fired guns in the air Police began to investigate a conflict between Tesco Lotus management and a group of military men over the operation of a motorcycle taxi queue in front of the store's Rama IV branch, following the rocket attack. Pol Maj-Gen Surasit Sangkhapong, head of the Crime Suppression Division, had ordered investigators to concentrate on the motorcycle queue dispute, a police source said. A group of soldiers obtained the store's permission to operate the motorcycle taxis, the source said. The store later asked them to quit after learning they demanded 7,000 baht from each motorcyclist joining the pool. The men were said to make as much as 300,000 baht a month collecting fees from the motorcyclists. This is because the British-run department store chain did not want to have anything to do with the extortion schemes that are rampant among the country's economic and political elite. The management allowed the motorcyclists to continue operating from in front of the store and charged only a one-time 200 baht registration fee. This did not please the corrupt senior soldiers, who set up a new pool of motorcycle taxis in the store area and continued to extort a monthly fee from those operating with the store's consent. The store filed a complaint with the CSD (the anti-corruption department), accusing the soldiers of trespassing and extortion, on October 17. Police ordered the soldiers to move their pool out. In an indication of how backward and uncivilised Thailand still is, he soldiers responded by entering the store one day during trading hours and firing their guns in the air to intimidate customers. The store laid a complaint with Thong Lor police. The soldiers then sent a major to negotiate with the store, but the management stood firm. The group vented their anger by firebombing a shelter for the store's motorcycle taxis. They then called the store, threatening to cause more trouble if they were not welcomed, the source said. CSD investigators said there were six or seven soldiers involved, led by a Sgt Kreeta, alias Bo, attached to the army's Provost Marshal General's Department. Witnesses saw a black Cherokee Jeep used by Sgt Kreeta near where the M72A-1 anti-tank rocket was fired about 5.30am. Sgt Kreeta and Nopporn had earlier been seen together. Police had contacted Sgt Kreeta's commander, asking to question him, the source said. Col Surasak Yangpradap, deputy managing-director of Pack Army Co, supplier of security guards for the store, told Pol Gen Chanchit Pienlert, deputy national police chief, he believed the attack had nothing to do with the store's security guard services. Pol Gen Sant Sarutanont, the national police chief, said the M72A-1, a portable weapon fired by a single person, had been used during the Vietnam war and was still available at some army units. Police found numbers on the rocket's tail section and the discarded launcher. They have asked army chief Gen Surayud Chulanont and Supreme Commander Adm Narong Yutthawong to help find the source of the weapon. Meanwhile, the Samut Prakan prosecution office dropped the case against Col Mongkol Naressenee. He was charged with masterminding the hand grenade attack at the Tesco Lotus store in Muang district of Samut Prakan on June 30. The charges were dropped after he agreed to pay senior police officers and the prosecutors a good percentage of the profits from his security company. Anti-West anger linked to attacks on retail giant Nopporn despised Western-style capitalism and foreign investment, investigators said on December 10. Police said it appeared that he had been paid to disrupt the British-owned Tesco Lotus company by traders who had seen their profits slashed by an influx of foreign stores. Hence, the anger in Thailand among the ordinary people towards Western (mainly American and British) commercial interests. Investigators said they found writings and documents in his house showing he loathed open markets that permitted foreigners to take a substantial share of business in Thailand and which many economists have admitted had impoverished many ordinary Thais. Nopporn had complained in his writings that his efforts to alert fellow Thais to the "foreign threat" with non-violent actions had been largely unheeded. His dislike of foreigners appeared to have been fuelled partly by a spell in the United States, where he claimed to have seen the plight of "fellow Asians exploited by the rich Westerners". In a strange twist to divert attention from senior members of Thailand's armed forces in being implicated in the events at the department store, officers said Nopporn could easily have been persuaded by retail competitors to fire an anti-tank rocket at Lotus, and later a few machine-gun rounds. The owners of small Chinese-run shop-houses and traders in local fresh markets had complained bitterly to the Government that Western-owned stores were devastating their businesses and impoverishing thousands of Thais who relied on these small businesses for work. The Government, which is seen by most ordinary Thais to be a pupper of American and British multinational corporations, offered little more than sympathy to shopkeepers, probably because individually they are not a strong lobby and the new stores are popular with consumers. Most Thais feel the reason onor agencies do not do anything effective to force Thailand's elite and government to become less corrupt is that they think the money that is stolen by the elite is actually a payment, a wage, if you will, to allow foreign-owned companies to take over the country's economy for their own profits. "He was by nature a very angry man and in these foreign shops seems to have found a target for his anger. He could easily have found shopkeepers who shared his views," said police colonel Amnart Chatrakul, deputy chief of Samut Prakan police district. Mr Amnart admitted that Nopporn had contacts with high-ranking military men of dubious character who supplied him with the weapons hoard found in his house. "There are several groups with grudges against Tesco. It's quite obvious he had contact with more than one group," he added. The Tesco store, which measures 25,000 square metres, nestles on a busy junction near the slums of Klong Toey, across the road from a branch of French-owned rival store Carrefour. These two rivals, and others, have been racing to grab the best locations since Tesco started buying most of the locally owned Lotus group in 1998. Thousands of families were forcibly evicted from their homes with little compensation in order to provide land for these huge department stores to be built. However, Pol Lt Col Thawatchai said the evidence in hand was not strong enough to implicate anyone in the attacks. "I don't dare to draw a conclusion. We are trying to resolve the case as soon as possible, so far it's still unclear," he said. Dead suspect an arms dealer - supplied Burmese, Sri Lankan rebels Nopporn was involved in arms dealing, an army source said on December 11, 2001. Nopporn had bought war weapons from some military officers for resale to minority rebels in Burma and the Sri Lankan separatists, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The weapons were imported by the officers from neighbouring countries. The source said high-ranking mafia soldiers in the Thai military and gunmen knew Nopporn well as he also sold them firearms and was skilled at modifying weapons. Nopporn was particularly close to an army colonel in charge of intelligence and was acquainted with army officers embroiled in contractual disputes over the supplying of security guards for the Tesco Lotus stores, the source said. Army chief Gen Surayud Chulanont said investigators were still trying to figure out how Nopporn came to amass a small armoury found at his home. Gen Yuthasak Sasiprapa, deputy defence minister, said the ministry would not take action until the police named any military personnel involved in the Tesco Lotus attacks. Nopporn was paid to carry out attacks Nopporn Suwanprueksachart was financed by Thai and Chinese businessmen to wreak havoc on stores with foreign-dominated ownership, according to his file records retrieved by police. The suspected attacker of Tesco Lotus stores also claimed to be a former member of Thailand's military intelligence organisation but said he was kicked out after being "double crossed". Police stumbled on the startling claims filed on computer compact discs belonging to Nopporn. Nopporn wrote he received money from a group of Thai and Chinese-descent businessmen to sabotage stores dominated by foreign ownership including Makro, Carrefour and Charoen Pokphand (CP) which together with the British retailer Tesco owns the Tesco Lotus superstores. Nopporn's financiers were focused primarily on weakening CP to prevent its retail expansion in China and other parts of Asia. A source in charge of the Nopporn investigation said that if Nopporn was still alive he would have caused more damage to the stores. Nopporn's writings attacked foreign companies for thriving through the demise of local companies. He accused politicians, senior military officers, and those in the justice system of being bought to accommodate foreign investors. "I will not allow this [intrusion of foreign firms] and swear to do everything in my power to fight it," Nopporn wrote. Nopporn also claimed to have been recruited into a military intelligence team to follow up on fugitive drug baron Wei Hsueh Kang, who oversees drug production by the United Wa Army in Burma. He said his ability to accurately pinpoint drug production bases and delivery routes had impressed the military. Nopporn said he had made friends with senior soldiers during many intelligence missions. But Nopporn claimed he was expelled from the team because he was "double-crossed". Enraged, he vowed to settle scores with those who had betrayed him. Nopporn tried in vain to volunteer information he had on the drug kingpin to the United States in order to claim a US$5 million reward. His writings show him growing increasingly frustrated after he learned a military officer he trusted had taken a job providing security for Tesco Lotus. The source said Nopporn had intended to publicly disclose his memoir, telling his wife Wandee Sae Heng he wanted to reveal the most "important secret" in his life. Tesco suspect's PC 'implicates officials' Information found on a computer at the home of Nopporn Suwanprueksachat, the suspect blamed for attacks on Tesco Lotus Superstores, implicated police and government officials in trafficking war weapons and violent activities, the police commissioner general said on December 17. Pol Gen Sant Sarutanont said investigators had obtained a great deal of of useful information from the deceased suspect's computer, not only about the attacks on Tesco Lotus branches, but also on alleged weapons trafficking in Chiang Mai. Identities of several government officials, both in the National Police Office and other agencies, were also stored on Nopporn's electronic files. Sant declined to release the information at the time. He said that Interior Minister Purachai Piumsomboon had been due to visit the National Police Office the following evening to see the information on Nopporn's computer disks and how it could be hidden to dimish the damage to senior police and government officials who were members of the country's elite.