At least two people have been killed after a shooting at a major shopping centre in Thailand’s capital city, Bangkok.
Police said a suspect was apprehended less than an hour after the first reported gunshots at the Siam Paragon shopping centre and has been taken into custody.
Video uploaded to social media and broadcast on television showed a long-haired teenage boy in the custody of police.
Major Thai media said he was 14, though recently appointed police chief Torsak Sukvimol confirmed only that he is a minor and appeared to be suffering from mental illness.
Mr Torsak said two people had been killed, a visitor from China and a Myanmar national, and five were injured.
Police spokesman Archayon Kraithong told reporters the situation was under control at the shopping centre, which sells high-end clothing and luxury cars and includes a cinema, an aquarium and the attached five-star Siam Kempinski Hotel.
Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin told reporters he was informed by police that one of the dead was a Chinese tourist about 30 years old.
“I would like to express my deepest condolences to the family of the deceased following the shooting inside Siam Paragon,” Mr Srettha, who took office in August, said in an earlier statement. “I would like to give my moral support to the families of all who died and were injured.”
Gun violence is not uncommon in Thailand, though mass shootings are rare.
The incident happened days before Thais were planning to mark the anniversary of the country’s biggest mass killing by an individual, a gun and knife attack at a rural daycare centre in a north-eastern province that killed 36 people, most of them young children, on October 6, 2022.
Tuesday’s shooting prompted authorities to temporarily shut access to the nearby Siam Square elevated train stop, preventing commuters from exiting as the evening rush hour began and intense rain fell in the city, according to an Associated Press journalist at the scene.
Emergency services personnel could be seen entering the shopping centre as sirens wailed outside.
Witnesses said crowds of people left the building, one of several shopping centers in the area popular with tourists and Thais alike.
Chinese tourist Liu Shiying told the AP that she saw people running and saying someone had opened fire. She said she heard gunshots and an alarm ringing, and that the lights in the shopping centre went out.
“We’re temporarily hiding. Who dares to go out?” she said while taking cover. She was later able to leave.
Gautam Vora, 45, an Indian national who works in finance in Bangkok, was at the shopping centre with his wife and child. He said it was “quite scary” even though he was initially unsure whether he had heard gunshots or “somebody playing a hoax with some firecrackers”.
”Everybody was screaming and running,” he said. “There was a lot of chaos and that was almost like a stampede.
“I don’t think they were well prepared for this,” he added. “I think most of the staff inside the shopping centre were confused and they were running helter-skelter, too.”
Multiple videos uploaded to social media showed people running out of the building, and several showed a person dressed in a baseball cap, dark shirt and camouflage pants inside the shopping centre, holding a handgun.
A video believed to be of the assailant after his arrest showed a long-haired boy wearing glasses dressed like that, with an American flag on his cap. Videos and photos also showed the pistol he was said to have been carrying before he was disarmed.
In 2020, a disgruntled soldier opened fire in and around a shopping centre in the city of Nakhon Ratchasima, killing 29 people and holding off security forces for some 16 hours before eventually being killed by them.
