“The evidence is simply Line chats,” Thanadej Puangpoon of the United Lawyers for Rights and Liberty said yesterday.

He believes that his requests for temporary release will be approved by the court and his clients won’t jump bail.

The judges have already calculated the bond for each suspect at about Bt100,000 each.

“So, we have prepared land-rights documents as surety. These assets come from their relatives and other sources,” Thanadej said.

On August 13, 17 people were arrested in the wake of coordinated attacks in Prachuap Khiri Khan and six southern provinces from August 10 to 12.

Most of them – 15 – remain in custody.

Jatuporn Prompan, chairman of the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD), accused authorities of arresting hardcore red shirts because they wanted to link the UDD to the attacks.

“In fact, the government should not politicise the issue. It should focus in the right direction, as no one knows if more such attacks will strike.

“The bombs used in the coordinated attacks involved cellphones and SIM cards that originated in a neighbouring country, similar to most incidents in the deep South,” he said.

Thanadej said the detained suspects were allowed to meet their relatives for the first time yesterday.

Of the 15 suspects, nine are elderly, aged from 61-70, while three are 50-60 years old and the rest under 50.

Some of them also have chronic health issues. Three have benign prostate hypertrophy, six hypertension, two gout, one diabetes and one brain infarction.

The Cross Cultural Foundation urged the government recently to launch transparent investigations into the arrest of these suspects.

“If the military is found to have committed a mistake, the government must release the suspects and provide them with remedial action and also take action against the officials involved,” it said in a statement,

Another red-shirt figure, Nattawut Saikua, said that be-cause the current government could not be checked, there was no way to know whether the investigation into the suspects was transparent. If a “regular” government had conducted such an “obscure” investigation, the opposition party would have already launched a no confidence debate, he said.