As the police hunt for a Thai woman and at least two foreigners reveals the scale of the network thought to be behind the August 17 bomb that killed 20 people, security analysts say this is a game-changer for Thailand.

But the jigsaw that is slowly taking shape still misses one critical piece: If the network is a Uighur smuggling syndicate, as Thai police have said, why did it bomb a civilian target in a high-profile public place, attracting the focus and resources of Thailand’s security forces by inflicting certain foreign casualties?

“It is clear that (the network) was preparing for future attacks,”

… “This is a case in which human smuggling is overlapping with terrorism,” Singapore-based security expert Rohan Gunaratna, author of a book on terrorism in Thailand, told The Straits Times.