A shooting in a major shopping center in Bangkok left three dead and four injured, Thai emergency services announced on Tuesday, October 3. The attacker was arrested and the situation has “returned to calm,” Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin said earlier.
Hundreds of people left the building, located in the center of the Thai capital, according to an Agence France-Presse journalist on site. Videos on social media show scenes of panic. The Siam Paragon is one of Bangkok's main shopping centers, popular with locals and tourists from all over the world.
One year after the kingdom's largest mass killing
This incident comes almost a year to the day after the largest mass killing in the modern history of the kingdom, in the province of Nong Bua Lamphu (North-East). A former police officer had killed thirty-six people, the majority of them children under the age of 5, during a murderous journey with guns and knives lasting more than three hours. Armed attacks continue to claim victims almost every week in the kingdom.
In 2017, the country had around ten million firearms, of which almost half (four million) were not registered with the authorities, according to the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss research program. In 2020, a shooting in a shopping center in Nakhon Ratchasima left twenty-nine people dead.
