BANGKOK: A Thai court on Tuesday convicted nine young Muslim men from southern Thailand of planning to set off a car bomb in the capital, in a case in which many of the defendants said they were tortured into making false confessions.

The Criminal Court in Bangkok found all nine guilty of two offences belonging to an underground criminal group and conspiracy and sentenced each to four years’ imprisonment. Five defendants were acquitted.

At least seven of the 14 defendants said they had been tortured or otherwise physically abused in custody, but the presiding judge said the court considered their allegations baseless as the men did not provide any evidence and did not report the cases to police.

The case began when at least 50 Thai Muslims, mostly students at Bangkok’s Ramkhamhaeng University, were rounded up in joint police-military sweeps on Oct 10, 2016. They were released but 13 were re-arrested the following month along with an additional suspect.

Tortured to confess

The guilty verdict was based mainly on the confessions. The only other major evidence presented against them was traces of explosive material found on one of the men one week after he was first detained.

All 14 men are from Thailand’s deep south, which has been plagued by a bloody insurgency since 2004. Muslims in the poverty-stricken south feel they are treated as second-class citizens in Thailand, which is overwhelmingly Buddhist.

Pornpen Khongkachonkiet, from the Cross Cultural Foundation, a human rights organisation that sent observers to the trial, said seven defendants testified in court that they were tortured while under detention in army camps either in Bangkok or in the southern province of Pattani.

“The degrees of severity of torture claimed by these men varied,” Pornpen said. “Their claims include being pun­ched, head-locked, and doused or sprayed with water and locked in cold rooms. These allegations raised concern about how the confessions were obtained.”

One of those originally detained, Tarmizi Tohtayong, described in court how he was blindfolded and beaten up until he agreed to sign a confession before he was released. When he was detained again, he denied involvement in plotting a bombing, then was doused with water and kept in a very cold room for days until he agreed again to confess. Tarmizi couldn’t read Thai but was told he would be released once he signed the document.

Published in Dawn, September 26th, 2018