Police, soldiers and paramilitary volunteers attacked students inside Thammasat University in Bangkok on October 6, 1976. The official count of the dead was 46, and unofficial estimates run much higher. The students had been occupying the campus for a week to demand the removal of Thanom Kittikachorn, the field marshal whose military government had been driven out of the country three years earlier, and to press for an elected government in its place. Shooting began before dawn.
The protest had started after Thanom came back from exile in September, first as a monk and then as a man with political ambitions again. Right-wing newspapers and radio stations had spent the week telling their audience that the students were communists. A student performance re-enacting the hanging of two labour activists had been photographed for a Bangkok newspaper, and right-wing groups called it an insult to the monarchy. The police and the army took the charge up. Several thousand people were already gathered outside the university walls when the shooting started.
The campus was sealed. Students who ran into the river were shot at, and others who gave themselves up were beaten on the road outside in front of photographers, so the images of that morning went around the world within days. Bodies were taken to the football field inside the compound. The university was closed. Students were dragged out too.
That evening the military took over the country, dissolving parliament and installing a hard-line government under Thanin Kraivichien. Thousands were arrested. Several thousand more went to the jungle camps of the Communist Party of Thailand, where many of them spent the rest of the decade. Thailand's experiment with open politics, which had begun after the uprising of October 1973, was over. No one has ever been prosecuted for the killings, and an amnesty law passed in 1978 covered those who took part.