The Vang Tao Incident was a episode broadcast live on Thai television. On July 3, 2000 a group of armed insurgents and mercenaries attacked a Lao customs outpost at the southern border town of Vang Tao. The raiders, as they came to be described, were easily routed leaving six of their own dead and 27 were arrested by Thai authorities, of those 11 were Thai nationals.
The attack followed a series of bombings in Vientiane attributed to Hmong rebels and coincided with a month-long lobbying visit by Prince Sauryavong Savang and Crown Prince Soulivong Savang to the United States. Some analysts concluded that the raid was likely a demonstration to gain financial and political support from Laotians abroad. There is a possibility that the military attack on the Communist government was financed by group called the United Lao Nation Resistance for Democracy in Laos based in California, USA.
Famous quotes containing the word incident:
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)