BANGKOK: Two Chinese Uighur men were sentenced to death on Thurs­day for carrying out a 2015 attack on a Bangkok shrine that killed 20 people, a long-awaited verdict in Thailand’s bombing case.

A Thai court convicted Yusufu Mieraili and Bilal Mohammed of premeditated and attempted murder for their role in planting a bomb at the popular Erawan shrine in Bangkok’s commercial heart in August 2015.

The deadly blast tore apart the site where worshippers and tourists had gathered, injuring more than 100 people and leaving the shrine littered with motorbike fragments and singed debris.

Multiple Chinese tourists were among the dead when explosives — apparently left in a backpack — detonated. “The defendants committed a single act that violated multiple laws. The court therefore impos­ed the harshest penalty available under the law, the death sentence,” one member of the four-judge panel said as the lengthy verdict was read out.

The defendants — both Chinese nationals who arrived in court in prison garb — were acquitted of charges stemming from a separate bombing at a pier in Bangkok’s Charoen Nakhon area.

Published in Dawn, June 12th, 2026