BANGKOK: Tuk-tuks and garishly colored taxis that once weaved through chaotic Bangkok traffic are sitting idle in storage as a fresh coronavirus surge scuttles hopes of relief for Thailand’s tourism-dependent economy.
The kingdom is currently undergoing its worst-ever stretch of the pandemic after largely keeping Covid contained when the illness first emerged last year.
Bangkok is subject to a night-time curfew and a ban on gatherings as authorities advise residents of the capital to stay home.
“Tourists, people going to work, shopping, hanging out with friends — these are our customers but they’ve all vanished,” said taxi driver Anuchit Surasit.
The 47-year-old had just dropped off his vehicle at a garage in western Bangkok, parking it among hundreds of other cabs on forced sabbatical.
While he loves being a cabbie, Anuchit said he has watched his income drop to just 300 baht ($9) a day.
He is also weighing the added risk of catching the highly contagious Delta variant of the virus that is now sweeping through the country its Southeast Asian neighbors.
“I need to stop driving for now and find something else to do because this occupation is too risky at the moment,” he said.
A lot attendant sprayed his taxi down with disinfectant and collected his keys.
Tourism accounts for a fifth of Thailand’s economy, which is suffering its worst crash since the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
The kingdom has seen a bare fraction of the 40 million tourists forecast to visit last year, before the pandemic began.
Around 100,000 people working in Thailand’s transport sector are now unemployed and more than half of metropolitan Bangkok’s taxi fleet is off the road, Thai Transportation Operators Association president Wasuchet Sophonsathien told AFP.
Tuk-tuk motortaxis — once a ubiquitous sight around Bangkok’s historic neighborhoods and a favorite transport mode of foreign travelers — have meanwhile largely disappeared from roads.
“I feel hopeless but I still have to fight for the survival of my family,” said 57-year-old driver Somsak Boontook.
The government has faced an avalanche of criticism for its management of the pandemic and the slow roll-out of vaccines.
It last week approved $920 million in funding to aid Bangkok businesses, including those in the transport industry.
But more needed to be done, said Wichai Supattranon, who started a transport business with his mother four decades ago and now owns a fleet of 60 furloughed tuk-tuks.
“The only solution I can see now is for the government to move forward and reopen the country as soon as possible,” he said.
Taxis and tuk-tuks come to a standstill after Thai virus surge
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Taxis and tuk-tuks come to a standstill after Thai virus surge
- Bangkok is subject to a night-time curfew and a ban on gatherings
It’s unusual that the Brown campus shooter has evaded identification this long, experts say
- Investigators have released several videos from the hours and minutes before and after the shooting that show a person who, according to police, matches witnesses’ description of the shooter
PROVIDENCE, R.I.: It’s been nearly a week since someone killed two students and wounded nine others inside a Brown University classroom before fleeing, yet investigators on Thursday appeared to still not know the attacker’s name.
There have been other high-profile attacks in which it took days or longer to make an arrest or find those responsible, including in the brazen New York City sidewalk killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO last year, which took five days.
But frustration is mounting in Providence that the person behind Saturday’s attack, which killed two students and wounded nine others, managed to get away and that a clear image of their face has yet to emerge.
“There’s no discouragement among people who understand that not every case can be solved quickly,” the state attorney general, Peter Neronha, said at a news conference Wednesday.
How is the investigation going?
Authorities have scoured the area for evidence and pleaded with the public to check any phone or security footage they might have from the week before the attack, believing the shooter might have cased the scene ahead of time. But they have given no sense that they’re close to catching the shooter.
Investigators have released several videos from the hours and minutes before and after the shooting that show a person who, according to police, matches witnesses’ description of the shooter. In the clips, the person is standing, walking and even running along streets just off campus, but always with a mask on or their head turned.
Although Brown officials say there are 1,200 cameras on campus, the attack happened in an older part of the engineering building that has few, if any cameras. And investigators believe the shooter entered and left through a door that faces a residential street bordering campus, which might explain why the cameras Brown does have didn’t capture footage of the person.
Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said Wednesday that the city is doing “everything possible” to keep residents safe. However, he acknowledged that it is “a scary time in the city” and that families likely were having tough conversations about whether to stay in town over the holidays.
“We are doing everything we can to reassure folks, to provide comfort, and that is the best answer I can give to that difficult question,” Smiley said when asked if the city was safe.
Although it’s not unheard of for someone to disappear after carrying out such a high-profile shooting, it is rare.
What can be learned from past investigations?
In such targeted and highly public attacks, the shooters typically kill themselves or are killed or arrested by police, said Katherine Schweit, a retired FBI agent and expert on mass shootings. When they do get away, searches can take time.
“The best they can do is what they do now, which is continue to press together all of the facts they have as fast as they can,” Schweit said. “And, really, the best hope for solutions is going to come from the public.”
In the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, it took investigators four days to catch up to the two brothers who carried it out. In a 2023 case, Army reservist Robert Card was found dead of an apparent suicide two days after he killed 18 people and wounded 13 others in Lewiston, Maine.
The man accused of killing conservative political figure Charlie Kirk in September turned himself in about a day and a half after the attack on Utah Valley University’s campus. And Luigi Mangione, who has pleaded not guilty to murder charges in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan last year, was arrested five days later at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania.
Felipe Rodriguez, a retired New York police detective sergeant and adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said it’s clear that shooters are learning from others who were caught.
“Most of the time an active shooter is going to go in, and he’s going to try to commit what we call maximum carnage, maximum damage,” Rodriguez said. “And at this point, they’re actually trying to get away. And they’re actually evading police with an effective methodology, which I haven’t seen before.”
Investigators have described the person they are seeking as about 5 feet, 8 inches tall and stocky. The attacker’s motives remain a mystery, but authorities said Wednesday that none of the evidence suggests a specific person was being targeted.
Meanwhile, Boston-area police are investigating the shooting death of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor earlier this week. Nuno F.G. Loureiro was attacked at his home Monday, and no one has been arrested or named as a suspect. The FBI said it had no reason to think his killing was linked to the Brown attack.
