'Red shirts' gather after botched arrests

One protest leader slid down a rope from a hotel balcony to escape riot police, while others were rescued by hundreds of ‘red shirts’, who heavily outnumbered security forces at a Bangkok hotel owned by the family of former premier Thaksin Shinawatra.

The three leaders later joined around 10,000 of their supporters at a shopping centre in the middle of the city, now the main site of month-long protests in the Thai capital.
“If they use force to disperse us, we will flatten the entire neighbourhood,” said Jatuporn Prompan, a protest leader.