21 January 2016•Update: 21 January 2016
By Max Constant
BANGKOK
Three Thai students who have been protesting a military-run historic park project mired in corruption allegations were arrested Thursday after arriving at a Bangkok police station to give moral support to a comrade whisked away by the military earlier.
In a video recorded minutes before their arrest, Chonticha Jangreaw – one of the three students – says, “we are here to give moral support to our comrade Sirawith Seritiwat. We also want to denounce the incident which happened to him on Wednesday night.”
In the clip uploaded to the Facebook page of the activist group, New Democracy Movement, she stresses, “trying to shut the mouth of the people who are speaking about corruption in public projects is not a solution. We will continue to fight.”
For almost a year, Thailand has been in the tight grips of a military junta, following the overthrow of the elected government of former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra in May 2014.
Jangreaw, 23, and the two other students accompanying her were then taken into custody inside the police station Thursday.
Their arrests came after a video clip posted on the websites of several Thai media late Wednesday evening showed Sirawith Seritiwat, another 23-year-old member of the Movement, being whisked away in a car by military officers.
He re-emerged Thursday at another police station where he gave a brief interview to a local journalist, saying he had been blindfolded and beaten by the officers.
The four students are part of a larger group who attempted last month to visit a $20 million military park located 200 kilometers south of Bangkok to investigate graft allegations, but were blocked midway and had arrests warrants for sedition issued against them.
They had refused to turn themselves in to police, but some appeared Saturday near the police station in charge of the case where they folded their police summons into paper cranes in a gesture of protest.
During a press briefing Monday, junta spokesperson Colonel Winthai Suwaree admitted that Seritiwat had been taken away by the military, but insisted that he was not mistreated.
“The soldiers treated him with honor. There was no violence as alleged by someone who tried to distort the facts,” he told the Khaosod news site.
He added that Seritiwat’s behavior had been “increasingly provocative” in the last few days.
The historic Rajabhakdi Park, located in the seaside resort of Hua Hin, features seven giant bronze statues of past Siamese kings.
It has been the target of corruption allegations since November when then army chief General Udomdej Sitabutr recognized that an intermediary had asked the owners of the foundries that cast the statues for commissions.
A military investigation that month cleared the project of any wrongdoings.
But doubts persisted and the Defense Ministry led another probe in December, which said no evidence of corruption had been found but recognized that the investigation was “limited to documents and staff of the Defense Ministry.”
