Thai mall shooter's family 'accept responsibility', apologise

BANGKOK – The family of a 14-year-old boy who allegedly

shot two people dead

at a mall in Bangkok apologised on Friday for their son’s actions in a statement released by the Thai government.

Police have

charged the teenager

, who has not been named, with murder over Tuesday’s attack at the Siam Paragon mall, which

left five other people wounded

.

The Thai authorities said the two victims’ families will each receive 6.2 million baht (S$229,000) in compensation, while the five injured will be paid 350,000 baht each, The Nation reported.

Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin vowed to take

preventive measures

after the shooting – the third high-profile deadly gun attack to hit the kingdom in the past four years.

“We offer our deepest apologies to the victims, the families of the deceased and the injured from the recent shooting incident that occurred as the result of our son’s actions at the Siam Paragon department store,” said the statement, distributed in Thai, English and Chinese to reporters by the Thai Foreign Ministry.

“We are deeply saddened and shocked by this incident and accept responsibility as fully as we can.”

The statement, signed by the father of the juvenile offender, pledged the family’s full cooperation with the police investigation.

The boy, a student at a US$4,000 (S$5,470)-a-term private school just metres from Siam Paragon, is undergoing psychiatric tests to see if he would be fit to stand trial.

Investigators said on Tuesday that he had been undergoing treatment for mental illness but had stopped taking his medication and reported hearing voices telling him to shoot people.

The attack was carried out with a blank-firing pistol modified to shoot live rounds. Police have arrested four people

suspected of selling a gun and ammunition

to the shooter.

The attack at one of Bangkok’s biggest, most upmarket malls is a fresh blow to Thailand’s efforts to rebuild its vital tourism industry after the Covid-19 pandemic.

On Friday, a senior officer from Thailand’s tourist police issued a video message to reassure visitors that the authorities are doing their utmost to ensure the safety of visitors to the country.

Gun epidemic

Thailand has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the region, with around 10 million firearms estimated to be in circulation – one for every seven inhabitants.

Past promises of

tightening gun laws

have not prevented repeated tragedies.

Friday marks the

one-year anniversary of a massacre at a nursery

in the country’s north, where an ex-policeman armed with a knife and a gun murdered 24 children and 12 adults.

In 2020, a former army officer

gunned down 29 people

in a rampage at a mall in the north-eastern city of Nakhon Ratchasima.

Travel restrictions during the pandemic saw visitor numbers to Thailand dry up.

China – which sent around 10 million visitors a year to the kingdom before the pandemic – is a crucial market, but numbers are not returning as fast as Thai officials would wish.

This is partly because of fears in China about whether Thailand is safe, and the fact that one of the mall shooting victims is Chinese is unlikely to improve this situation. AFP