Thai student burns school to get out of class

BANGKOK - A Thai teenager who torched the library at his boarding school to avoid having to attend class said he got the idea from protesters who burned buildings in Bangkok last month, media reports said Monday.

The 16-year-old, whose grades had been slipping, reportedly confessed to having set alight the facility at the Mahidol Witthayanusron School, some 60 km northwest of the capital, in the early hours Sunday.

No one was injured in the blaze, but the co-ed school which has around 720 students was closed for the week.

According to the English-language Nation newspaper, the boy said he had copied what he saw on television news when anti-government, or so-called red shirt protesters, burned buildings in Bangkok after a government cracked down on their two-month old demonstration.

The buildings burned included Central World, one of Thailand’s largest shopping malls, and the Siam theatre, one of Bangkok’s oldest cinemas.

“The boy said that it seemed okay for adults to burn buildings. So he decided to copy those actions,” the Nation quoted Panalda Disakul, governor of Nakhon Pathom province, where the school is located, as saying.