What’s made from plastic, has a number of items of wire and two plastic antenna probes? A bomb detector, of course.
The Thai military was duped into purchasing the dodgy bomb detectors 13 years in the past. Some 320 of them! With the ongoing insurgency in southern Thailand, the bomb detectors had been a potential answer for ferreting out small ordinances in the three southern provinces of Pattanai, Yala, and Narathiwat, earlier than they exploded. Or that’s the method it was bought to the Army.
Yesterday, the Thai PM announced that the Ministry of Defence had already taken legal motion towards the native suppliers of the fully useless ‘bomb detectors’, marketed because the GT-200, in search of compensation of 747 million baht.
A Move Forward MP Jirat Thongsuwan asked parliament who, or which, organisation must be held accountable for the procurement scandal involving the GT-200s. They had been bought from a British company over two years, from 2006, with contracts valued at a number of hundred million baht.
According to Thai PBS World, in January 2010, the British government banned the export of the ADE651 bomb detecting system to Iraq and Afghanistan, after discovering that the system is a pretend (and not even a great fake), and warned foreign governments that the ADE651 and GT-200 are “infective in detecting bombs or explosives.”
The GT200 was produced by UK-based Global Technical Ltd, which claimed the gadget might detect, from a distance, various substances including explosives and medicines. It was distributed to numerous totally different countries in 2001 beneath the name GT200, ALPHA46, ADE+651, and AL-6D. The first group that imported and used the GT200 device was the Royal Thai Airforce.
The owner of Global Technical, the British producer of the gadgets, was later convicted and sentenced to seven years in a UK jail.
To make matter worse, the Royal Thai Army spent 7.5 million investigating 320 of the procured models. Cash claimed, after the investigation, that the GT200s, all 320 of them, had been “only ok for use as a “cat poop scoop”.
The system was first used at Bor Thong Airport in Yala. Officials had been “impressed by the results” so extra units had been imported into different departments. But the device’s effectivity was questioned after it didn’t detect automotive bombs in Narathiwat.
The device was examined and it was found that it could solely detect 4 bombs from 20. This outcome led to an additional investigation and prosecution of the distributing companies and relevant Thai officers. From 2001 to 2010, Thailand imported 1,398 GT200 and ALPHA46 devices, costing 1.2 billion baht.
The Thaiger believes that the GT200’s capacity to detect four bombs out of 20, as reported by the Royal Thai Army, is completely inconceivable provided that the design and function of the plastic box and some wires can be unable to detect a nuclear explosion at point-blank vary.
But MP Jirat Thongsuwan already knew that.
“We all know that the device was just an empty plastic box with two plastic antennae that couldn’t detect any bombs. When anyone requested about the contract signing with NSTDA, the Royal Thai Army would say it is a secret.”