“Thai authorities destroyed or obstructed their human trafficking businesses”, Somyot Poompanmoung told on yesterday, explaining the apparent motive for the attack.

Both stem from Turkish anger over Thailand’s forced repatriation of 109 Uighur Muslims to China in July, Pol Gen Somyot added.

For weeks the police have skirted around mentioning the word Uighur or suggesting their possible involvement in the attack, despite arrests and warrants that increasingly pointed in that direction.

Thai police say the man who may have actually planted the bomb may have fled across Thailand’s southern border to Malaysia, but Khalid refused to speculate on that.

Somyot said the Bangkok bomb and the ransacking of the Thai consulate in Istanbul – which occurred the day after the deportation – were “for the same reason: illegal human migration, with an origin here and destination Turkey”. “Put simply, we destroyed their business”, he said. “It could be a normal crime and by human traffickers”, he said. “We also sent them to Turkey, not just China”. However, Mr Prawut said on Monday that the suspect had left Dhaka for New Delhi before heading for Abu Dhabi and then to Turkey.

The Thai police previously said that one of the suspects had a Chinese passport showing that he was from Xinjiang, the Uighur homeland in far western China.

Police spokesman Lt. Gen. Prawut Thavorn-siri said that intelligence reports indicated that Abu Dustar Abdulrahman, or “Izan”, a Chinese national, had changed his itinerary to Istanbul instead of going to China. This is his final destination.

Foreign envoys, top government advisers, former high-ranking officials, and private investigators who spoke to The Diplomat on condition of anonymity all point toward probable rogue security force involvement in the sophisticated yet locally attuned August 17 blast. The theory is that a hybrid criminal-terror group staged the attack in revenge for their Turkic brethren’s mistreatment in Thai custody.

Diplomatic protocol dictates that when arrest warrants are issued by one country concerning another’s citizens – or claims are made that a suspected criminal has fled to that country – the second country is immediately alerted, however in this instance this appears not to have been the case. Unconfirmed reports cited by diplomats indicate an unknown number of Uyghur detainees may have been shot and killed by Thai immigration police while protesting against their planned deportation to China.

Thailand disrupted the network’s movement of the migrants when it captured them and placed them in a detention camp in southern Thailand past year before deporting them blindfolded and under armed guard, Pol Gen Somyot said. China’s foreign ministry said days after the blast that Uyghurs were not behind the bomb, despite the deaths of five Chinese nationals and the collateral opportunity a joint investigation would offer for bilateral intelligence-sharing at a time Beijing seeks stronger strategic ties with Bangkok.