NAKHON RATCHASIMA: In a fourth-floor toilet of the Terminal 21 mall, shoppers jammed cubicle doors against the entrance to keep out a Thai soldier on a shooting spree, tracing his movements through fragments of CCTV passed on by friends on the outside.
Barricaded in the women’s toilet with a few dozen others, Chanathip Somsakul, a 33-year-old music teacher, and his wife pored through social media and made frantic calls to friends and family.
Their daughter Chopin sat watchfully on a ledge, a three-year-old bystander to a mass killing without precedent in Thailand.
Nakhon Ratchasima, a mid-size Thai city entwined like much of the northeastern Isaan region by tight family connections and social media networks, quickly began to rally to its own trapped inside.
“A friend who works at the mall was talking to a guy in the CCTV control room... he gave us updates on the location of the gunman,” Chanathip told AFP on Sunday.
Those details, shared over messaging apps, may have saved the lives of Chanathip, his family and the 20-30 others inside.
But in the swirl of competing information, dread gripped those hidden inside cupboards, storerooms and toilets across the mega-mall.
“Everyone was terrified and lost. There was so much information going around, people weren’t sure what to believe,” Chanathip added.
For hours, a killer stalked the concourses, the glass-fronted windows of the multi-level mall spider-webbed by bullet holes.
The gunman — a soldier apparently angered by a dispute over the sale of a house — had already slain several people on his way into the shopping center, the largest in the city and packed on the first day of a long weekend.
Sergeant-Major Jakrapanth Thomma swaggered through the mall, a machine gun slung over his shoulder and wearing a helmet and combat gear, in full view of CCTV cameras.
By the end of his spree at least 30 people would be dead — himself included. Many more are wounded, several critically.
Fear snapped through Chanathip’s hideout when someone banged on the toilet door.
“I thought it could be the gunman. A lady asked ‘who is it?’ but there was no answer. She wanted to open the door but we all convinced her not to.”
Chanathip had just finished teaching a music lesson and — like hundreds of others — was eating in the mall with his family when gunfire erupted.
His family took refuge in the women’s toilet. Some men pulled the toilet doors off and wedged them against the entrance.
At 9 p.m. on Saturday they received word from police that they could leave, which they did — in an orderly fashion at first, along with dozens of others.
But gunshots rang out as they reached a car park, sparking a wild sprint.
Inside, scores of others remained trapped, cowering in gym toilets, under restaurant tables and in store rooms — hoovering up information on the whereabouts of the gunman.
From inside the stockroom of H&M, Aldrin Baliquing, a Filipino teacher in his 40s, meditated to stay calm.
“I was so scared because the shop where we were trapped was just above the establishment where the gunman held his hostages,” he said, referring to unconfirmed reports the rogue soldier had taken human shields.
As police began to clear bullet-riddled cars and rust-red blood stains on the street that had dried in the Thai heat, survivors tried to make sense of a night of terror.
“Everything happened so fast,” Lapasrada Khumpeepong, 13, told AFP during a Sunday vigil for the dead and injured.
She and her mother had been trapped in the bathroom on the ground floor of Terminal 21, cornered there for five hours after they tried to flee from the sound of rapid gunfire.
“Thank you to those who sacrificed themselves to keep others alive,” she scrawled on a condolences board at the vigil.
“Without you, we would not be here today.”
Thai mall shooting survivors tracked killer via CCTV
https://arab.news/gszu5
Thai mall shooting survivors tracked killer via CCTV
- Authorities are still piecing together details of how a soldier killed at least 29 people and wounded dozens
Afghanistan says it thwarted Pakistani airstrike on Bagram Air Base as fighting enters fourth day
- The fighting has been the most severe between the neighbors for years
- Pakistan accuses Taliban government of harboring militant groups that stage attacks against it
KABUL: Afghanistan thwarted attempted airstrikes on Bagram Air Base, the former US military base north of Kabul, authorities said Sunday, while cross-border fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan stretched into a fourth day.
The fighting has been the most severe between the neighbors for years, with Pakistan declaring that it’s in “open war” with Afghanistan.
The conflict has alarmed the international community, particularly as the area is one where other militant organizations, including Al-Qaeda and the Daesh group, still have a presence and have been trying to resurface.
Pakistan accuses Afghanistan’s Taliban government of harboring militant groups that stage attacks against it and also of allying with its archrival India.
Border clashes in October killed dozens of soldiers, civilians and suspected militants until a Qatari-mediated ceasefire ended the intense fighting. But several rounds of peace talks in Turkiye in November failed to produce a lasting agreement, and the two sides have occasionally traded fire since then.
On Sunday, the police headquarters of Parwan province, where Bagram is located, said in a statement that several Pakistani military jets had entered Afghan airspace “and attempted to bomb Bagram Air Base” at around 5 a.m.
The statement said Afghan forces responded with “anti-aircraft and missile defense systems” and had managed to thwart the attack.
There was no immediate response from Pakistan’s military or government regarding Kabul’s claim of attempted airstrikes on Bagram or the ongoing fighting.
Bagram was the United States’ largest military base in Afghanistan. It was taken over by the Taliban as they swept across the country and took control in the wake of the chaotic US withdrawal from the country in 2021. Last year, US President Donald Trump suggested he wanted to reestablish a US presence at the base.
The current fighting began when Afghanistan launched a broad cross-border attack on Thursday night, saying it was in retaliation for Pakistani airstrikes the previous Sunday.
Pakistan had said its airstrike had targeted the outlawed Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP. Afghanistan had said only civilians were killed.
The TTP militant group, which is separate but closely allied with Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, operates inside Pakistan, where it has been blamed for hundreds of deaths in bombings and other attacks over the years.
Pakistan accuses Afghanistan’s Taliban government of providing a safe haven within Afghanistan for the TTP, an accusation that Afghanistan denies.
After Thursday’s Afghan attack, Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif declared that “our patience has now run out. Now it is open war between us.”
In the ongoing fighting, each side claims to have killed hundreds of the other side’s forces — and both governments put their own casualties at drastically lower numbers.
Two Pakistani security officials said that Pakistani ground forces were still in control on Sunday of a key Afghan post and a 32-square-kilometer area in the southern Zhob sector near Kandahar province, after having seized it during fighting Friday. The captured post and surrounding area remain under Pakistani control, they added. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity, because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
In Kabul, the Afghan government rejected Pakistan’s claims. Deputy government spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat called the reports “baseless.”
Afghan officials said that fighting had continued overnight and into Sunday in the border areas.
The police command spokesman for Nangarhar province, Said Tayyeb Hammad, said that anti-aircraft missiles were used from the provincial capital, Jalalabad, and surrounding areas on Pakistani fighter jets flying overhead Sunday morning.
Defense Ministry spokesman Enayatulah Khowarazmi said that Afghan forces had launched counterattacks with snipers across the border from Nangarhar, Paktia, Khost and Kandahar provinces overnight. He said that two Pakistani drones had been shot down and dozens of Pakistani soldiers had been killed.
Fitrat said that Pakistani drone attacks hit civilian homes in Nangarhar province late Saturday, killing a woman and a child, while mortar fire killed another civilian when it hit a home in Paktia province.
There was no immediate response to the claims from Pakistani officials.
