A picture taken from an elevated moving train shows investigators working at the Erawan Shrine after a bomb explosion, central Bangkok, Thailand, on Monday. The explosion killed 22 people. Photo: IC

A bomb went off near the popular Hindu Erawan Shrine in downtown Bangkok on Monday evening, killing 22 people and injuring more than 100 people by press time, Thai authorities said.

Thai police said at a press conference late Monday that the victims of the bombing at the shrine, a major tourist destination, included Chinese and Filipino tourists.

There have been conflicting reports about the number of bombs found and where they were placed. The bomb detonated at 6:55 pm. Local media have reported that Thai police then found and defused another two bombs.

Chulalongkorn Hospital appealed for bilingual volunteers to translate between Thai and Chinese, a volunteer Li Meng told the Global Times.

Zhu Weidong, Counselor and Consul General of the Chinese Embassy in Thailand, told the Global Times that two Chinese tourists, a male and a female, were confirmed dead, but the total number of injured was not available yet.

The embassy brought nine volunteers to serve as translators at the hospitals.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast. Thai forces are fighting a low-level Muslim insurgency in the predominantly Buddhist country's south, but those rebels have rarely launched attacks outside their ethnic Malay heartland.

"The perpetrators intended to destroy the economy and tourism, because the incident occurred in the heart of the tourism district," Defense Minister Prawit Wongsuwan told Reuters.

The Erawan Shrine, on a busy corner near top hotels, shopping centers, offices and a hospital, is a major attraction, especially for visitors from East Asia, including China. Many ordinary Thais also worship there.

The government would set up a "war room" to coordinate the response to the blast, the Nation television channel quoted Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha as saying.

Apart from the two Chinese nationals, one person from the Philippines is among the dead, a tourist police officer said. Domestic media have given a higher death toll, reporting that 27 people had been killed, 10 men and 17 women.

"It was like a meat market," said Marko Cunningham, a New Zealand paramedic working with a Bangkok ambulance service, who said the blast had left a two-meter-wide crater.

"There were bodies everywhere. Some were shredded. There were legs where heads were supposed to be. It was horrific," Cunningham said, adding that people several hundred metres away had been injured.

Stepped-up security

Authorities have stepped up security checks at some major city intersections and in tourist areas.

Groups in southern Thailand and transnational terrorists are two major suspects, terrorist expert Sajjan M. Gohel told CNN on Monday.

While initial suspicion might fall on Muslim separatists in the south, Thailand has been riven for a decade by an intense and sometimes violent struggle for power between political factions in Bangkok.

Occasional small blasts have been blamed on one side or the other. Two pipe bombs exploded outside a luxury shopping mall in the same area in February, but caused little damage.

Police said that attack was aimed at raising tension when the city was under martial law.

The army has ruled Thailand since May 2014, when it ousted an elected government after months of at times violent anti-government protests.

Reuters contributed to this report