By Sintana Kosolpradit and Pracha Hariraksapitak
BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thousands of "red shirt" protesters were camped at an upmarket shopping district in Thailand's capital on Thursday, although they were not planning to resume their campaign for some days.
Bangkok was celebrating the final day of Thailand's three-day New Year Songkran holiday, but despite the calm, political analysts warned that the risk of a military coup in this Southeast Asian country was escalating.
"We aren't making any move in the next couple of days as we will be busily putting facilities in place for our brothers and sisters after they return from the countryside after Songkran," protest leader Nattawut Saikua said.
The campaign for new elections, which has lasted more than a month and erupted into savage fighting between protesters and troops on Saturday in which at least 22 people were killed, looks set to hit growth in Southeast Asia's second-largest economy.
It has been relatively calm since then. The police and army did not intervene to prevent protesters from gathering at the Rachaprasong shopping district and were not in evidence on Thursday after another peaceful night in the Thai capital.
The red shirts, mostly supporters of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, want Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva to quit immediately have said they will use their base in Rachaprasong as a "final battleground."
Abhisit has been largely absent from the media, ensconced in a fortified army base on the outskirts of Bangkok to which the red shirts sent gifts of fried rice and iced coffee, the common food of Thai families visiting relatives in prison.
"Badly damaged by the military response, Abhisit now has no other options than to go to the country or resign, both of which will set Thailand on course for an early election," risk consultancy Control Risks said in a report published on Thursday.
"If threatened further by political instability, created for example by snap polls, the threat of military leaders launching a coup would rapidly escalate," it said.
Thailand has had 18 coups in the past 77 years, most recently in 2006 when Thaksin was ousted.
LOSSES
Chai Srivikorn, president of the Rachaprasong business association, was quoted by the Post Today newspaper as saying that the cost of the protest to the affluent shopping district was running at about 150 million baht (3 million pound) a day.
Investment bank Morgan Stanley calculates economic growth this year could be cut by 0.2 percentage point due to the impact on tourism, which accounts for 6 percent of gross domestic product in the "Land of Smiles" and employs 1.8 million people.
A bigger loss of up to 0.6 percentage point of GDP could come from the hit to consumer confidence in the capital which has borne the brunt of the fighting.
The government has forecast 4.5 percent growth this year if the protests were not prolonged.
Thailand's stock market, one of Asia's most buoyant this year on the back of a steady influx of foreign funds, fell over 5 percent on Monday before closing 3.64 percent down and is likely to see renewed selling on Friday, analysts said.
The Bangkok Post reported that the military had admitted for the first time that it used live ammunition during Saturday's protests. Previously, it had insisted that only rubber bullets were used and that the deaths were due to "terrorists."
There were also signs that the political divide in Thailand between the mostly rural red shirts and the urban, pro-administration "yellow shirts" was likely to grow.
The yellow shirts, whose own street protests led to the ouster of a government backed by Thaksin in 2008, will meet on Sunday to discuss how to end the "terrorism" gripping Bangkok.
"We don't think the dissolution of parliament will resolve the problem," Suriyasai Katasila, leader of the yellow-shirted People's Alliance for Democracy, told Reuters.
Thaksin, who is in exile after he was sentenced to jail for corruption, said on his Facebook page that he was in Saudi Arabia and refuted rumours that he was ill.
"I have been to Riyadh and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia from April 10-12 at the invitation of a prince of Saudi Arabia to provide consultancy for projects to build two new towns," he wrote.
"So the rumour that I am ill isn't true," he said on his page (http://www.facebook.com/thaksinlive).
(Writing by David Chance; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
