BANGKOK, Sept. 26 (UPI) — A man being held in connection to the deadly Bangkok shrine bombing in August was the person who carried out the attack, Thai police said.
The man, who has been identified as Adem Karadag but has numerous aliases, admitted to planting explosives that ripped through Bangkok’s Erawan Shrine, leaving 20 dead and 100 injured. Thai police said he had bomb-making materials in his apartment and a stack of blank Turkish passports.
“He accepted the crime,” police spokesman Prawut Thawornsiri said. “All the information we have leads back to him.”
Surveillance footage before the bombing showed a man in a yellow shirt going into a restroom and changing his clothes before he left the shrine area. Police said Karadag, 28, is the same person on the footage.
Saturday, police will take Karadag and Yusufu Meirailee, who was arrested earlier this month in connection to the bombing, to the area near the shrine to re-enact the moments that led up to the attack, common in Thai police investigations. Investigators said the attack was not politically motivated.
“Today, police officials are very confident that both Adem and Yusufu are the perpetrators, and that the yellow-shirted Adem planted the bomb while Yusufu triggered it,” national police chief Gen. Somyot Poompanmoung said.
