Chalerm Not Worried About Violence During Red-Shirt Rally

[Flashermac]

A safe house has been established nearby Aksa Road, where the pro-government red shirts plan to hold a mass rally tomorrow, and the Metropolitan Police will look after the homes of important figures in the area, director of the Centre for the Administration of Peace and Order Chalerm Yoobamrung, said yesterday.

 

Residences to be protected include the home of Suthep Thaugsuban, secretary-general of the anti-government People's Democratic Reform Committee, he said.

 

Deputy police chief Pol General Worapong Chewprecha has been assigned to oversee security operations at the rally, Chalerm, who is also caretaker Labour Minister, said.

 

Chalerm said he had visited the rally venue, and said he was not worried about violence.

 

He said he had learnt from Aree Krainara, chief guard for the United Front of Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD), and Nuttawut Saikuar, secretary-general of the UDD, that there would be no marching.

 

The rally venue was spacious, and intelligence had found that a lot of protesters would come from the Northeast, he said.

 

One protest guard was shot dead and four protesters wounded, two of them women, on Tuesday in a broad-daylight attack that further inflamed the political conflict.

 

The group, from the Students and People's Network for Thailand's Reform, a faction of the PDRC, was returning from a rally led by Suthep at the Chaeng Wattana camp in a three-vehicle convoy when it was hit with gunfire as it passed a tollgate and entered an expressway in Nonthaburi.

 

Nisit Sinthuprai, a leader of red shirts in the Northeast and director of the Red Shirts Academy, said 200,000 members would come to join the mass mobilisation tomorrow.

 

The People's Radio Media Group, a red-shirt offshoot, would start its march as part of the campaign against the Constitutional Court and the National Anti-Corruption Commission by proceeding from place to place and distributing flyers detailing the "injustices" they believed these bodies had committed.

 

Spokesman Sornrak Malaithong said the marchers would start off this afternoon from The Mall Bang Kapi, Imperial World Lat Phrao and Future Park Rangsit. They would visit Bangkok's inner areas sometime in the future but would avoid the PDRC's protest sites, Sornrak said.

 

 

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