Thai police on Saturday said they were investigating new security camera footage showing a man dropping a package into a canal as the hunt for those behind Monday's deadly Bangkok bomb blast entered its fifth day without arrests. CCTV video widely circulated by local media Saturday showed a man in a blue t-shirt kicking the package off a footbridge in the same spot where a device exploded on Tuesday without injuries.
That second blast intensified anxiety in an already rattled city, following Monday's bomb attack on a religious shrine in Bangkok's commercial heart that cut down 20 people and wounded scores more. Authorities have not ruled out a link between the two explosions. The shrine bomb killed mostly ethnic Chinese tourists from across Asia, and has left police scrambling to find the assailants.
National police spokesman Prawut Thavornsiri confirmed that the new footage was being examined to decide whether the man dropping the package into the water near Saphan Thaksin pier was a suspect. "We have to verify the information," he told told AFP adding the situation was "still confusing". The unverified footage is time-stamped just a few minutes after Monday's blast, which struck at 18.55pm (1155 GMT). It shows the man in the blue t-shirt carrying something heavy in a plastic bag. He goes to the side of a footbridge, places the bag down and then uses his mobile phone. Around a minute later he pushes the bag into the canal with his foot, kicking up a visible splash of water.
The following day, shortly after 1:00 pm on Tuesday, an explosion went off in the canal, which is near a popular tourist pier, sending people scurrying for cover but causing no injuries. Until now the search for the perpetrator of Monday's attack has focused on a primary suspect in a yellow t-shirt seen placing a heavy rucksack under a bench at the shrine.