Thai policeman surrenders after shooting his wife dead at a kindergarten

Two minutes, and then a siege

The couple had attended their son's wedding only days earlier, according to sources cited by the Bangkok Post.

A witness, Somyot Sanguanworapong, 57, said he watched a man arrive by car, approach the teacher and speak to her before a shot was fired; others fled as the gunman walked back to the car and drove off. A municipal official, speaking anonymously, said the officer walked towards his wife holding his gun and shot her without a word, then paused to look at her before leaving. The whole episode lasted about two minutes.

Teachers kept the children in their classrooms for roughly 20 minutes afterwards, unsure whether the gunman was still on the premises. The school closed for the rest of the day, and classes were suspended until Friday as a precaution.

Security video from the school, described by the Bangkok Post, shows the gunman walking towards his wife at 10.38am. He then drove to the family house in the Flower Park Villa 2 estate.

Through Wednesday night, officers set up lighting near the house and kept trying to talk the man out. A son of the gunman, himself a police officer, was reported to be travelling back from the south of the country to help negotiate. The siege ran on past midnight, with officers in protective gear holding positions around the estate, and ended only on Thursday morning when he gave himself up.

A third school shooting in five weeks

The case lands in the middle of a national argument about guns, and it is the third shooting at a Thai school in just over a month.

On 7 August a rampage at Debsirin Nonthaburi School left seven people dead, including the 14-year-old gunman, who had shot his grandparents to death earlier that day. On 2 September a 14-year-old boy, himself the son of a police officer, was detained after walking into a secondary school in Kamphaeng Phet province, 200km north of Bangkok, and firing several shots. A security guard was grazed by one of the bullets.

Calls for tighter controls have grown louder since. The national government has ordered a review of firearms regulation, including suspending the issue of new purchase permits and re-examining ones already granted. The Chonburi governor, Naris Niramaiwong, confirmed the evacuation of the school in a statement posted to Facebook, and classes across the kindergarten stayed shut while officers worked at the scene.

Thailand has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in Asia despite laws that are, on paper, fairly restrictive. Mass shootings remain rare, but the country has seen a run of high-profile attacks in recent years, and each one has reopened the same question about how a restrictive statute book coexists with so many weapons in circulation. What distinguishes this case from the other two is who was holding the weapon. The other suspects were schoolboys; this one was a serving officer, using a gun in a country where the police are among the most heavily armed institutions, and the killing happened in front of a school full of five-year-olds. The siege that followed was conducted by his own colleagues, with his son, another officer, asked to talk him out. Whatever review of permits and licences follows, none of it would have applied to the weapon used here, which was carried by a man the state had armed.