On September 19, 2006, Thailand's army chief General Sonthi Boonyaratglin led a bloodless military coup that ousted the elected government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra while Thaksin was in New York attending the UN General Assembly. Troops and tanks occupied government buildings without resistance, martial law was declared, and the constitution was suspended. King Bhumibol Adulyadej subsequently endorsed the takeover, appointing Sonthi to lead the Council for Democratic Reform.
Sonthi cited the need to prevent an imminent violent crackdown on protesters as justification. After roughly two weeks as interim leader, Sonthi transferred power to civilian Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont, while Thaksin remained in exile.
Films & Footage
Tanks in the streets of Bangkok during the September 2006 coup. Photo: Dl4gbe · CC BY-SA 3.0Thai soldiers outside Nation Tower during the 2006 coup. Photo: Curtis Winston · CC BY-SA 3.0 / GFDL 1.2
Independent research, added record by record. Hover any label for what it means.
Target identified in Coup Atlas research: Thaksin Shinawatra, Prime Minister of Thailand
RESEARCHED NAME
Key figures
Gen. Sonthi Boonyaratglin (coup leader, Army Commander-in-Chief)
Thaksin Shinawatra (ousted Prime Minister)
Surayud Chulanont (interim Prime Minister appointed after coup)
King Bhumibol Adulyadej (endorsed the new authority)
Sources
The coup occurred on September 19, 2006, marking Thailand's first coup in over 15 years, led by army chief Gen. Sonthi Boonyaratglin, who overthrew the elected government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
Tanks and troops under Sonthi's command occupied major government buildings without resistance; Thaksin, who was in New York for the UN General Assembly, fled into exile.
The military seized administrative power from the Thaksin government on 19 September 2006 without any violence or resistance, declared martial law, and suspended the constitution.
Sonthi served as interim leader for about two weeks before transferring power to Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont, and headed the Council for National Security under an interim constitution.
Sonthi justified the coup as necessary to prevent bloodshed, claiming he learned Thaksin planned to crack down on anti-government protesters the following day.
Both sources fetched this session (Khaosod English and GlobalSecurity.org) agree on the core narrative with no contradictions found. Attempted Britannica page returned 404 and Bangkok Post was blocked by robots.txt, so those were not used. | Both source URLs are real and live, and I fetched each directly. All 6 VERIFIED facts are substantively supported by their cited sources. Two issues found and corrected: (1) source_year for the two GlobalSecurity.org facts was listed as "2026," which is clearly an artifact of the fetch date rather than the page's actual date — the page's own "Page last modified" stamp reads 03-04-2012, so source_year was corrected to 2012. (2) The summary's closing claim that the coup "is widely seen as a turning point that deepened Thailand's political divide and set the stage for further unrest and a subsequent 2014 coup" has no corresponding sourced fact in the entry and was trimmed as unsupported editorializing. Minor secondary flag (not grounds for downgrade): the "quotes" for facts 1 and 2 are composited paraphrases stitched from multiple sentences in the Khaosod article rather than single verbatim quotes, but they fairly represent content actually on the page, so both facts were kept as VERIFIED. target_leader is well supported and unchanged.
How It Unfolded
Hand-coded by Coup Atlas from the sources on this page, using a fixed list of tactics. Only events we have read through carry this coding, so most records do not have it yet.
Led by
Military
How long it took
Under a day — resolved within 24 hours
Troop movements in the capital or key cities
Seizure of broadcasters / coup declaration on state media
Declaration of martial law or curfew
Suspension of the constitution or dissolution of institutions
Cross-Reference
Datasets agree. At least two of the three reference datasets we check against carry this event, and none of them disagrees about its date or its result.
Identifiers for finding this same event in the other datasets:
Coup Atlas research identifies the target as: Thaksin Shinawatra, Prime Minister of Thailand.
Baseline coding: Incumbent executive removed from power. Recorded leader fate: deposed; tried; fled the country. The baseline file does not name individual targets; researched names are kept in a separate layer.
Baseline Dataset Citation
Cline Center Coup d’État Project Dataset, v2.2.2
Peyton, Buddy, Joseph Bajjalieh, Michael Martin, and Andrea Gerald. 2026. Cline Center Coup d’État Project Dataset. Cline Center for Advanced Social Research. V.2.2.2. February 17. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. doi: 10.13012/B2IDB-9651987_V10
“Investors express hope on economic benefits from bloodless coup The overthrow of Thaksin’s government may bring more stability and help overcome weak business confidence, writes Amy Kazmin: [LONDON 1 ST EDITION],” September 21, 2006
The Christian Science Monitor
“Thai coup uproots a thin democracy ; Thailand’s king endorsed the military leaders of Tuesday’s bloodless overthrow of Prime Minister Thaksin.: [ALL Edition],” September 21, 2006
The Economist
“Special Report: Old Soldiers, oldhabits-Thailand’s military coup; Thailand’s military coup,”September 23, 2006
This is the citation trail carried by the baseline dataset, grouped by outlet and rejoined from the line-wrapped original. Coup Atlas has not independently re-checked every document; read the original before citing a specific claim. URLs the import damaged beyond safe repair are shown as plain text and listed in citations-report.md. How this list is built →
