Thai police: Iranian bomb attack suspects had ‘more than terror on their minds’

PanARMENIAN.Net - The three Iranian men detained for allegedly plotting bomb attacks in Bangkok on Israeli diplomats had more than terror on their minds in Thailand. Police said Friday, Feb 17, they had also cavorted with prostitutes at a beach resort, The Associated Press reported.

The news comes as Thai authorities announced they were searching for two more suspects in the botched bomb plot, including a possible explosives specialist who may have been training the Iranians.

The foiled plan was discovered Tuesday when explosives in the men's rented house blew up by mistake, forcing them to flee. Two were detained in the Thai capital, and a third was captured Wednesday in neighboring Malaysia as he reportedly tried to return to Iran.

After flying into the southern city of Phuket on Feb. 8, the men moved to Pattaya and stayed there for at least two nights before heading to Bangkok. Located 45 miles (70 kilometers) southeast of the Thai capital, Pattaya is particularly notorious for its sleazy sex industry and large contingent of prostitutes.

The Iranians hung out with several female sex workers during their stay there, and one of the women was brought to Bangkok to identify the suspects on Thursday, said Lt. Col. Noppon Kuldiloke, a senior immigration police investigator in southern Thailand.

A cell phone image taken by one of the women, published by the Bangkok Post with an article headlined "Suspects partied in Pattaya," purportedly showed the three Iranians at a Middle Eastern bar or restaurant surrounded by hookah water-pipes, two of them cradling women in their arms. The men posed for the photo around a low, drink-filled table on which there appeared to be at least one bottle of beer.

The woman who took the image said one of the now-detained suspects, Mohammad Kharzei, had asked her to escort him "because he was not good at speaking English," according to the Bangkok Post.

She said she brought two companions for Kharzei's friends, and they had drinks and played snooker together. The woman detected nothing awry, except when one of the Iranians "barred her from approaching a closet" in his hotel room, the newspaper reported.

The botched plot has ratcheted up tensions between Iran and Israel, which is accusing Iran of waging a covert campaign of state terror that included a bombing Monday in New Delhi that tore through an Israeli diplomatic vehicle, wounding an Israeli diplomat's wife and driver, and a failed bomb attempt the same day in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

Iran has denied responsibility for all three bomb plots, and blames the Jewish state for the recent killings of Iranian atomic scientists.