Conspiracy of errors has saved Bangkok thus far

Conspiracy of errors has saved Bangkok thus far

Thailand continues to play a bit role in the Mideast conflict and, as the Valentine's Day bomb debacle in Bangkok has shown, the country also seems to attract mostly second-string operatives in the violence.

Bomb experts move a mattress from the second floor of a bomb-damaged house off Sukhumvit Soi 71. The house was rented by Iranian nationals, two of whom were detained following three explosions on Tuesday. SOMCHAI POOMLARD

Four major terrorist operations have spilled out of the Middle East into Bangkok in 40 years, and three of the four have ended not just in failure but in guffaws.

Iran has been fingered in the media as the chief suspect in all three of the violent incidents since the founding of the Islamic republic in 1979, although it has never has been proved complicit.

More than ever, Teheran has come under close scrutiny because Iranian citizens apparently were cooking up a bomb plot in a house on Sukhumvit Road when their explosives accidentally blew their conspiracy apart.

The first major Mideast terrorist attack in Thailand, however, occurred seven years before the Ayotollah Khomeini led an uprising that threw out the shah and established an Islamic theocracy in Iran.

It occurred on Dec 28, 1972. Then Black September crashed into a party at the Israeli embassy and took the ambassador and other guests hostage. Black September was the al-Qaeda of the 1970s. The group virtually invented airline hijacking and up-close, in-the-TV-camera-lens executions of its prisoners. There was little doubt that the armed and extremely dangerous embassy invaders meant what they said, which was: "Give us a plane to leave Thailand with our hostages."

Enter one of Thailand's unsung heroes, the late ACM Dawee Chullasapya. He took over security operations outside the embassy building and opened face-to-face negotiations with the invaders.

Legend, never proven, has it that ACM Dawee bolstered his diplomacy with a few bottles of Scotch, a drink he certainly knew a lot about. In any case, within a few hours he had convinced the bad guys that they really were the bad guys, because they had taken the nation's focus off the ceremony for the Crown Prince, thereby offending all of Thailand. There was no way Thais could support the Black September if they acted so rudely.

He arranged a Royal Thai Air Force cargo flight to Cairo _ after they released all hostages. ACM Dawee personally accompanied the terrorists to Egypt, where a crack commando force grabbed the tired and confused Palestinians and took them away and they were never _ literally never _ accounted for or seen again.

Thailand 1, Terrorists 0.

The Iran-Saudi disagreements flared right after the ayatollahs took control of Iranian politics. But the Gulf confrontation was not the only site of the continuing, bitter disagreement.

In 1989 and 1990, three Saudi diplomats were killed in Bangkok under circumstances that gave a whole new meaning to "mysterious" _ so mysterious that the murders of the Saudis often is conflated with that other Thai-Mideast information black hole: the theft of the blue diamond.

Saleh Abdullah al-Maliki, accredited as the third secretary at the Saudi embassy, was gunned down on Jan 4, 1989. Within 48 hours, two Iran-friendly groups (and later subsumed into the Hezbollah in Lebanon) had claimed responsibility.

Three more Saudis were killed in January 1990. One was probably linked to the robbery, the stolen jewellery and the recruitment of Thai labourers. The other two were almost certainly political victims, like Maliki.

That was the first, and only time, that terrorism from the Mideast prevailed in Thailand.

Less than four years later, a small gang almost certainly fanatically friendly to Iran _ if not more _ launched a tragicomic attempt to blow up the new Israeli embassy, a fortress on Lang Suan Road in Bangkok.

The first part of the plan went well. The gang rented a truck and driver, killed the Thai driver, tossed his body into a large drum at the back of the truck and covered him with tonnes of material for a "fertiliser bomb", ammonium nitrate and fuses.

Once again, however, terrorism yielded to ignorance _ simple ignorance, basic ignorance of language, customs and driving ability.

Without a single local person to depend upon, the would-be Iranian terrorist clambered into the high seat of the rented truck and around noon on March 11, 1994, set out for the Israeli embassy.

And naturally, just 300 metres from the Israeli embassy, the would-be suicide bomber clipped the back of a motorcycle with his vehicle. This touched off the usual brouhaha over damages, with only one person aware of what was really going on.

The motorcycle owner tried to hold the would-be bomber, but he broke free and fled east, down Sukhumvit Road. A witness claimed he saw the fugitive enter the Iranian embassy's religious affairs office, a lead that was never followed.

Eventually an Iranian, Hossein Shah-riari Far, was arrested in southern Thailand. In court, he put on a strange defence that he had an evil twin brother who might have been involved.

Convicted twice, he was finally freed by the Supreme Court in February 1998, for lack of solid, eyewitness evidence.

It was notable that the Iranian embassy attempted to strong-arm the government over the case. On the eve of the Supreme Court verdict, the Iranian ambassador issued a public warning of serious problems if Shahriari were not freed.

"Iran and [Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal] Kharrazi should try to grasp the facts of the trial," the Bangkok Post noted in an angry editorial. Shahriari got off and went somewhere. But Bangkok and everyone around the Israeli embassy and Soi Lang Suan also got off.

Thailand 2, Terrorists 1.

Tuesday's events on Sukhumvit 71 Road still have a long way to play out, but appear to up Thailand's lead, 3 to 1.

It will be wise, however, not to assume every such terrorist gang can't bomb straight.

The Valentine's Day tale of the legless Iranian has a strong similarity to a bomb factory in the heart of Manila in 1995. Most of those involved in the plot to kill the pope and to bomb airplanes were as incompetent as Tuesday's Bangkok bombers. But their leader, Ramzi Yousef, was a successful terrorist who had already launched a bomb attack on the New York World Trade Center and a China Airlines plane, among others.

Margaret Thatcher, after narrowly escaping a terrorist bomb, noted that "they only have to get lucky once". The more terrorists try to attack Bangkok, the greater the chance they will one day succeed.

Alan Dawson

Online Reporter / Sub-Editor

A Canadian by birth. Former Saigon's UPI bureau chief. Drafted into the American Armed Forces. He has survived eleven wars and innumerable coups. A walking encyclopedia of knowledge.

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