EOD officers and their dangerous jobs in the Deep South

Members of the Explosive Ordnance Disposal in the Deep South have shifted to destroying suspected improvised explosive devices (IED) instead of trying to defuse them for safety reasons.

          Colonel Krittapas Kruanet, commander of EOD of the Anothai Task Force, told Isranews agency that the human loss from bomb explosions while attempting to defuse the IEDs and the high risk involved in the job had prompted both the army’s and the police’s EOD units to play safe by turning to destroying them although the later method means a loss of vital evidences which will help trace the bomb makers.

          He explained that each bomb maker had his specific way of making bombs or his signature and this would be lost if the bombs or IEDs were destroyed instead of being carefully defused.  However, he said that destruction still left some traces of evidences which still could be collected, painstakingly though, analysed in order to trace to the bomb makers.

          He estimated that there are about 40 bomb makers in the troubled region as several of them have been arrested.

          The colonel who have a long experience of hunting and defusing bombs in the restive Deep South said that bomb-making techniques by the separatists had been developed in the past decade since the start of the insurgency war in 2004 by a new generation of separatists.

          In the initial stage, the bomb-making techniques were learned or copied from abroad.  They were not complicated and the triggering mechanism used included Casio alarm clocks and Nokia cellphones, said the colonel, adding that, in subsequent years, the bomb makers have become more experienced and advanced – some of them with background in electronics – and, therefore, their bombs are more complicated and more difficult to trace.

          For instance, he said that, in recent years, cellphones were still used as the triggering mechanism but the sim cards were removed to prevent officials from tracing back to the owners of the phones.  Instead, the alarm clock mechanism in the cellphones was used to set off the bombs in place of ringing the phones.

          Also, the bombs or IEDs are more powerful and have multiple triggering mechanism, said the colonel.  The roadside bomb which destroyed an armoured car in Panareh district of Pattani on September 10 last year weighed about 90 kilogrammes.

          The bomb which killed Pol Sub-Lt Shan Warongpaisit, aka Dab Shan, and two members of this EOD unit on October 28 last year was, in fact, three bombs connected together with multiple triggering mechanism, including moving trap.

          The same kind of bomb was planted in a roadside shelter along Narathiwat-Tak Bai road in Tak Bai district of Narathiwat was uncovered an defused on October 7 last year.

          Colonel Krittapas said that the advent of new applications in social media such as Line had been very useful for bomb disposal operations.  Field bomb demolition squads can take photos of suspected IEDs at the scene and send them by Line to their colleagues in the offices to help examine and analyse the objects.

          For the past ten years, 2,889 bombing incidents were recorded.  And last year alone, six EOD officers, including Dab Shan, were killed while doing their job.

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Caption : Colonel Krittapas Kruanet