A shooting in one of the country’s busiest shopping centers left at least two people dead and several injured, some in serious condition. The shooter is in police custody. This is a 14-year-old minor.
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At least two people, one Chinese and the other Burmese, were killed and five others injured in a shooting in Bangkok. The shooter, a 14-year-old teenager, was apprehended after an hour, after the first shots were fired from a handgun, around 4 p.m., the peak time of this luxury shopping center in the city center from Bangkok. Very quickly, dozens of ambulances arrived to help the injured. Videos published by the police on social networks show the killer, haggard and confused, reports our correspondent in Bangkok, Carol Isoux.
The fourteen-year-old young man suffers from mental disorders and had not taken his medication, the police chief said. He explained to the police that he had heard the order to shoot. Educated in a renowned private college in the capital, he wears long hair and a cap bearing the image of the United States flag, which has already led some commentators to deplore an Americanization of Thai society.
The shooting caused scenes of panic in the shopping center, with witnesses recounting the hasty evacuation of hundreds of people. Located in the heart of Bangkok, Siam Paragon is a tourist and commercial hotspot which attracts many visitors, particularly Chinese, in a context of rebound in tourism in Thailand after the pandemic.
Nearly half of firearms are unregistered
The problem of large numbers of firearms in circulation is a concern in Thailand, even though the number of mass shootings falls far short of that in the United States. The country is preparing to commemorate the massacre at the end of the week, on Friday October 6 in a nursery last year, which saw the death of around thirty children in the north of the country. A former police officer then killed 36 people, the majority of whom were children under the age of five in a nursery, during a murderous journey with guns and knives which lasted more than three hours.
Armed attacks continue to claim victims almost every week in the kingdom, without the situation changing much on a legal level. Thailand (70 million inhabitants) had around ten million firearms in 2017, of which nearly four million were not registered with the authorities, according to the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss research program.
In 2020, a killing in a shopping center in Nakhon Ratchasima left 29 dead.
(And with AFP)