BANGKOK-
One of the leaders of anti-government protests in Thailand was shot dead on Sunday when violence erupted as demonstrators in Bangkok tried to block early voting for an election next week.
Police identified the man as Suthin Taratin. At least five other people were also injured in the clash.
Protesters stormed polling stations in Bangkok on Sunday, chaining doors shut and suspending advance voting in nearly all centres ahead of a disputed election next week.
A deputy prime minister said 45 of 50 polling stations in the capital had been shut down and advance voting was disrupted in 10 of Thailand’s 76 provinces.
“Protesters blocked voters. In many areas of Bangkok protesters used force to prevent people from voting,” Foreign Minister Surapong Tovichakchaikul, also a deputy prime minister, said in a televised address.
“This is a very serious offence indeed.”
On Saturday, a government minister said Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra was willing to discuss calling off the February 2 election if activists ended more than two months of often riotous protests and agreed not to boycott or interrupt a rescheduled poll.
Yingluck called the snap elections of February 2 election in the hope to cling on to power in the face of the riots.
Yingluck’s government had warned anyone who tried to stop voting would face jail or fines, or both.
Any delay in the poll will do little to repress the resolution of protest leader Suthep Thaugsuban, a former deputy prime minister, who has rejected elections, and is unlikely to provide a quick resolution to the current deadlock.
It was already unclear whether the election would go ahead after a Constitutional Court added to the pressure on Yingluck on Friday with a ruling that opened the possibility of a delay.
The government declared a 60-day state of emergency, in effect from last Wednesday, to try to restrain protests. While mainly peaceful, nine people have been killed and scores wounded in periodic violence.
The protesters had vowed to shut down Bangkok – the world’s most visited city in 2013 – on January 13 and have since occupied key intersections, disrupting some aspects of daily life.
The protests are the latest eruption in a political conflict that has gripped Thailand for eight years and which is starting to hurt growth and investor confidence in Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy.
The conflict broadly pits Bangkok’s middle class and elite, and followers in the south, against mainly poor rural backers of Yingluck who is accused of being the puppet of her brother, Thaksin Shinawatra; ousted former premier, in the heavily populated north and northeast.
-AGENCIES