Grenade attack at Thai protest leaves 1 dead

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BANGKOK (Reuters) - A grenade attack on protesters occupying the Thai prime minister's office killed one person and wounded 23 on Thursday, the most serious assault on the three month sit-in at the compound, police and protest leaders said.

The Bangkok Post said an M-79 grenade had exploded near the main stage of the protest, which began in late August to force the elected government from power.

"Last night they threw a bomb at our rally at Government House," PAD spokeswoman Anchalee Paireerak told the crowd.

Police said the attack occurred at around 3:25 a.m., but they were barred from entry to the compound and so had little information.

The Nation newspaper identified the dead person as a 48-year-old man who died of shrapnel wounds to the throat.

The People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) protest is led by royalist businessmen and academics trying to prevent former leader Thaksin Shinawatra returning to power following his removal in a 2006 coup.

The PAD campaign, which started in late 2005 and contributed heavily to the coup, has paralysed government decision-making and exacerbated the threat of recession in Thailand as its export-oriented economy takes a hit from a global slowdown.

The attack is likely contribute to another fall for Thai stocks, which will be under pressure after U.S. equity markets plunged to their lowest levels in 5- years on Wednesday.

Thailand's political temperature has been relatively calm for the last two weeks, with many people in both the pro- and anti-government camps turning their attention to last weekend's high-profile cremation of the king's elder sister.

However, analysts always said the lull would almost certainly be only temporary, and so Thursday's attack comes as no surprise. Last month, one renegade old general threatened to launch daily bomb attacks against the PAD.

A PAD speaker read a letter on stage from protest leader Chamlong Srimuang vowing to respond to the latest attack, the most serious in a spate of small grenades lobbed at the protest venue in the last month.

"We will no longer let this kind of incident happen. PAD leaders will have an urgent meeting this morning and will announce to PAD members what we will do next," Chamlong, a retired major-general, said in the letter.

There was no immediate comment from the government of Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat, who is Thaksin's brother-in-law.

Since the PAD overran the Government House compound in August, Somchai has been working out of temporary offices at Bangkok's old airport.

(Reporting by Darren Schuettler; Writing by Ed Cropley; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

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