Pressure mounts on Thai junta over fake bomb detectors

Bangkok / AFP

Activists on Monday urged Britain to hand over details of the multi-million-dollar sale to Thailand of fake bomb detectors that led to the detention of scores of innocent people.
British fraudster Gary Bolton was jailed in 2013 for making millions selling the GT200—which he billed as a “magic wand” able to detect tiny particles of explosives or drugs from hundreds of metres away.
It was in fact a useless home-made plastic box with a radio antenna—made for $6 but sold for between $3,300-$13,000 per unit to governments including Thailand, Mexico and Iraq.
On Monday Jatuporn Prompan, the leader of Thailand’s pro-democracy ‘Red Shirt’ street movement, urged the British embassy in Bangkok to share details of contracts between Bolton’s firm and the kingdom’s officials.
“Particularly the contracts of broker companies which sold them (GT200) to the Thai government and how much they cost,” he said in a YouTube post.
A corruption probe into why the Thai military and several other departments bought the device despite expert advice has ground to a halt.
Thailand’s army chief at the time was Anupong Paojinda, the current interior minister and an architect of the 2014 coup that restored the military to power, toppling the Red Shirts’ hero Yingluck Shinawatra.
Anupong repeatedly defended the use of the fake detector even as tests cast serious doubt over its efficacy.