Bangkok bomb fingerprints match suspect’s

Thai police say the fingerprints of a man arrested at Thailand's border with Cambodia match those they found on a bottle containing bomb-making material.

The bottle was among many items seized during a raid Saturday of an apartment on the outskirts of Bangkok where another suspect was arrested as part of the investigation into the deadly Aug. 17 bombing at the Erawan Shrine.

Both suspects are being interrogated by the military and have not yet been charged.

National police spokesman Prawut Thavornsiri said Wednesday that while DNA tests were still underway, the man arrested at the border on Tuesday “is important and is related to or conspired with people” behind the bombing that killed 20 people and wounded more than 120.

But Prawut could not confirm if the arrested man was the chief suspect seen on grainy security footage dropping off a backpack at the shrine and leaving before the bomb went off. He said the man “looked like” the chief suspect.

English-language Thai newspaper Bangkok Post reported on Wednesday that an image of what some claimed to be the suspect’s Chinese passport, issued in Xinjiang and bearing a Uighur name, had gone viral on social media. Al Jazeera could not immediately verify the photo at time of publication.

Prawut said that picture had not been released by the government and he did not know where it had come from, Reuters reported.

The suspect's arrest came after security forces detained another foreign suspect in weekend raids on the outskirts of Bangkok, in which they also found explosives.

In the first apartment, raided Saturday in the Bangkok neighborhood of Nong Chok, police arrested a suspect they described as a foreign man and seized bomb-making equipment that included detonators, ball bearings and a metal pipe believed to be a bomb casing.

They also took fingerprints from the apartment, which turned out to match those of the suspect arrested Tuesday at the border with Cambodia, Prawut said Wednesday.

“We can confirm that the man's fingerprints match with those found on a bottle that contains a bombing substance,” Prawut said, and then added, “He could be the one who brought the bomb out of this apartment or he could have brought the bomb to the crime scene.”

The man arrested on Tuesday was detained in Sa Kaeo province to the east of the capital near the Cambodian border. He has been transferred to Bangkok for questioning.

Pictures of the suspect shown on television showed a thin man in a baseball cap, sunglasses and with a short mustache.

Police issued three more arrest warrants on Tuesday for foreign men who are suspects, Prawut said, adding that one of them may be Turkish.

Police also said they had transferred 22 officers from their posts for negligence. The transfers came just a day after the police chief promised a reward to investigators for making the first arrest.

Police have been criticized for an erratic investigation, which had made little progress until the weekend. Police issued arrest warrants for a Thai woman and a foreign man on Monday.

The woman, Wanna Suansuant, has contacted authorities and would meet police, Somyot said on Tuesday. He gave no details.

Her family told police on Monday she traveled to Turkey to work with her partner and child two to three months ago.

No one has publicly claimed responsibility for the attack, sparking an array of theories about who might be behind it. Thai authorities have been looking into a possible Turkish connection. Fake Turkish passports were seized and police requested a Turkish translator to assist in questioning the 28-year-old man they arrested on Saturday, according to officials.

Speculation has centered on sympathizers of Uighur Muslims, opponents of the Thai government, and southern ethnic Malay groups.

Thailand drew international outrage in July when it forcibly repatriated more than 100 Uighurs to China.

Al Jazeera and wire services