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117 AS HE NAVIGATED his motorcycle taxi through Bangkok’s notoriously congested streets, Boonserm Saendi likely had his eye out for oncoming traffic. It was about 9 am on March 11, 1994, and rush hour was at its peak. Saendi drove a passenger to the Chidlom branch of the Central Department Store in the Lumpini neighborhood of the city’s Patumwan district. Saendi was parked at an entry-exit zone when a truck turning left out of the department store’s underground garage hit him. Little did he know it, but Saendi had just inadvertently foiled a Hezbollah plot, almost a year in the making, to bomb the Israeli embassy located just another 240 meters down the road.1 The truck continued down the road, showing no signs of stopping until two motorcyclists who witnessed the accident stopped the driver some fifteen to twenty meters down the street. Presumably, the driver wanted to reach his ultimate destination , dismayed at being stopped so close to his goal. When one of the motorcyclists approached the driver, objecting to his failure to stop at the scene of the accident , the driver said nothing but quickly reached out his window and offered the motorcyclist what he described as “three greenish foreign currency notes.” Rejecting the money, the motorcyclist insisted the driver exit the truck, which he did. At this point, an agitated Boonserm Saendi insisted the truck driver return to the scene of the accident. But when the two got there, the driver, who spoke a foreign language, gestured that he had to make a phone call. He entered the shopping center and disappeared.2 Saendi filed a victim’s complaint with the police concerning the accident, the police took the abandoned truck to the Lumpini police station, and no one thought much of the frustrating but not uncommon incident. So far as the police, the victim, and the witnesses were concerned, this was a simple hit-and-run fender bender. Some time passed, and eventually the owner of the rented truck, Ms. Linchi Singtongam , was tracked down and summoned to claim her vehicle. When she arrived, the owner noticed odd, customized adjustments that had been made to the vehicle. The windows were tinted with filtering film, but only on the driver’s side. Two posts were removed from the truck’s platform, increasing the storage space, and an extra 5 A Near Miss in Bangkok 118 Chapter 5 spring was attached to the chassis, enabling the truck to carry more than a ton of cargo. She informed the police of the unauthorized alterations, which led them to examine the vehicle more closely. What they found amazed them, yet remained largely unexplained for another five years.3 Inside the truck, police found a full, bolt-locked water tank, two oil containers, a battery, and a leather bag with Arabic writing on it. As soon as the police broke the lock on the water tank, a noxious odor of diesel fuel filled the truck, combined with a rotten smell. It was not water in the tank but rather “white granular objects ,” which, after further investigation, were determined to be approximately a thousand kilograms of fertilizer. About thirty centimeters into the tank, investigators found wires connected to metallic objects. As they emptied the tank, they found detonators connected to metal tubes and bottles filled with C4 explosives. A circuit and a 12-volt battery led to a wire threaded through the handle of the tank, then through the truck and into the front cabin, where it ended at two manual switches located beneath the driver’s seat. The investigators were standing in a professionally built and highly combustible vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, or VBIED; in layman’s terms, a truck bomb customized for a suicide bomber.4 Only when the Thai police removed the explosives from the water tank, which some police reports described as more of a metal drum, did they discover a dead body at the bottom of the drum, beneath the urea fertilizer and explosives. The owner of the truck recognized the murdered man as one of her company’s drivers, and confessed to police that she had rented out the truck to a person who preferred not to provide the standard documents required to rent a vehicle, such as a driver’s license or passport. The owner’s only condition had been that one of her employees drive the rented truck. This employee had been strangled before being stuffed into the...

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