Thailand's "red shirt" protest movement petitioned the International Criminal Court (ICC) on Monday to investigate whether the government and military were guilty of crimes against humanity and the premeditated murder of civilians during the suppression of protests last year.
A law firm that also represents fugitive former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said in a 136-page report snipers were told to assassinate protest leaders and troops authorised to "shoot anything that moved" during the unrest in April and May in which 91 people were killed and more than 1,800 wounded. It said an international investigation was necessary because the Thai judiciary was either unable or unwilling to prosecute government officials and military personnel.
"The 'investigations' launched by Royal Thai Government are guaranteed to result in a complete whitewash of the entire incident," London-based Amsterdam & Peroff said in the report. The report draws extensively on the testimony of an unspecified number of unidentified officers in Thailand's military, which it merges into a single witness statement "to make it more difficult for the Thai authorities to identify them".
It says that most of the violence that erupted in April and May last year after anti-government red-shirt protesters occupied strategic swathes of downtown Bangkok was deliberately provoked or initiated by the military to create a pretext to crack down violently and try to kill the movement's leaders.
But authorities said protest leaders were trying to provoke violence in the hope a crackdown would eventually lead to the fall of the government and they blamed the violence on armed elements within the red shirt movement. Mysterious gunmen dressed in black with their faces covered in hoods and balaclavas were seen moving among the protesters and firing in the direction of troops.
The government says the shadowy gunmen were terrorists who were allied with the red shirts and responsible for most of the deaths during the clashes. Some of the most potentially explosive accusations said to come from sources inside the military are that journalists and medical workers were specifically targeted to prevent evidence of killings from being recorded, and that soldiers posing as medical workers took away dead bodies to two hospitals where incriminating evidence was destroyed by way of cremation.