Thailand court sentences two Uighur men to death for 2015 Bangkok shrine bombing

A court in Thailand has handed the death penalty to two men for a 2015 attack at a Bangkok shrine that killed 20 people, the deadliest bombing in the country’s history.

The court issued its long-delayed ruling on Thursday, convicting two Uighur men of premeditated and attempted murder for their role in planting a bomb at the Erawan Shrine in Bangkok’s commercial heart on August 17, 2015.

“The defendants committed a single act that violated multiple laws. The court therefore imposed the harshest penalty available under the law, the death sentence,” one member of the four-judge panel said.

The attack also wounded more than 120 people. Five of the dead were from mainland China and two from Hong Kong.

Both of the accused, Yusufu Mieraili and Bilal Mohammed, will appeal the sentence within a month, a lawyer for one of the men, Choochat Kanpai, told reporters.

The defendants had repeatedly denied the charges against them.

The case has taken more than 10 years to reach trial, with prosecutors collecting evidence from hundreds of witnesses. They also struggled to find an appropriate interpreter for the suspects.

There have been a lot of questions about the legal process, said Al Jazeera’s Tony Cheng, reporting from Bangkok on Thursday.

“It’s a case that has dragged on for a decade. It started in 2016 in a military court, that was the period when Thailand was under military rule after the military coup. It then moved in 2022 to a civilian court. A lot of the evidence has been very dense, very complicated. Ten thousand pages of testimony submitted; more than 400 witnesses questioned,” he said.

Cheng added that despite the guilty verdict and death sentence, not much is known about the alleged network surrounding the defendants.

No group claimed responsibility for the bombing, but security experts say it was an act of retaliation against the forced deportation of more than 100 Uighurs from Thailand in the previous month.

“One of the assumptions after the attack is that it was targeting Chinese tourists and that’s why these two Uighur nationals and the investigation afterwards focused on Uighur nationalists – because they felt it was a response to the crackdown that was going on in Western China at the time and the fact that Thailand had extradited a number of Uighurs who had escaped and sought sanctuary in Thailand,” said Cheng.

Uighurs say they flee China’s northwestern Xinjiang region due to persecution. Beijing rejects the claims.

China has faced criticism for the perceived tough restrictions it has imposed on religious and cultural freedoms in Xinjiang, where the majority of Uighurs live.

The Erawan Shrine is right in the centre of the Thai capital and is “Bangkok’s most celebrated shrine”, said Al Jazeera’s Cheng. It remains popular with locals and tourists, including Chinese visitors.