BANGKOK, Jun 14 (IPS) - A chat room on a popular Thai-language website is drawing visitors over a troubling question: Will ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra be assassinated when he returns home?

''I am concerned about Thaksin's security,'' writes one visitor to ‘Rajademnern,' the room for political dialogue and comments on the ‘Panthip.com' website. ‘'If he wants to come back to Thailand, he should not take (the national airline) Thai Airways. He should take another international airline.''

This buzz on the fate of Thaksin, who was driven out of power in a military coup last September, has grown since Wednesday. It has emerged in the wake of a comment made that day by Gen. Sonthi Boonyaratglin, the army chief and head of the junta, warning Thaksin from returning to the country.

‘'The majority of people still oppose him so if he came back now, in the middle of the crisis, it would put his life in danger,'' Sonthi told a Bangkok radio station. ‘'It would be very dangerous for him.''

Some Thaksin supporters have drawn parallels between this threat and what happened over two decades ago in the Philippines to Benigno Aquino, a popular opposition figure forced into exile during the years of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship. Aquino was shot dead at the Manila airport in 1983 on return from exile.

Thailand, however, has been spared such high-profile political assassinations since it became a constitutional monarchy in 1932. ‘'We have never had political assassinations where leading, national political figures have been targeted,'' Thanet Aphornsuvan, assistant professor of history at Bangkok's Thammasat University, said in an interview. ‘'The only political killings on record are at local and municipal level, involving the local contenders.''

The prospect of Thaksin returning from nine months in exile in London and other Asian cities has gathered pace after a committee appointed by the junta ordered local banks on Monday to freeze 1.5 billion US dollars worth of assets held in 21 domestic accounts by Thaksin and his wife.

A day later, the country's military-installed prime minister, Surayud Chulanont, told reporters that Thaksin's decision to return to ‘'fight the charges'' was hardly surprising. ‘'His reasons for wanting to return are understandable,'' Surayud, a former army chief himself, said. ‘'He does not have to seek permission (from the junta).''

The order by the Asset Examination Committee, which scrutinised the business deals Thaksin is alleged to have illegally profited from during his five years as prime minister, could not have come at a worse time. Barely two week earlier a special tribunal appointed by the junta delivered a ruling to disband the Thai Rak Thai (TRT- Thais Love Thai), the political party Thaksin started nine years ago, and bar from politics all its leaders for five years.

‘'It confirms that the new government is going the whole way against the TRT,'' Chanida Chanyapate, deputy director of Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based think tank, told IPS. ‘'They are doing so one by one to try and end Thaksin's party.''

Despite what Sonthi says, the TRT continues to have a huge following. The estimated 14 to 16 million supporters it had at the time of the September 2006 coup makes it the largest political party in this South-east Asian nation. This substantial vote base of TRT supporters lies in the poorer, rural provinces thanks to the benefits from Thaksin's pro-poor policies, like a universal health care scheme.

Thaksin, who was a billionaire telecommunications tycoon before becoming the country's leader in 2001, has earned two firsts to his name, denied to the 22 prime ministers who preceded him. He was the first premier in the country's history to finish a full four-year term and the first leader to be reelected to a consecutive term in office.

Since the coup, both he and his party have also become the first to stand up and fight the military that captured power through a coup --Thailand's 18th over the last seven decades. ‘'This is new for Thai politics, what Thaksin and his supporters are doing,'' says Thanet, the historian. ‘'The deposed prime minister is not going away after the coup unlike before, but has become a force; so, too, his party and its supporters.''

The past weekend reinforced this reality. Anti-coup demonstrators, many of them TRT loyalists, clashed with the police on Saturday night. The estimated 10,000 people who had gathered at a rally in an open field in the historic part of Bangkok ahead of the clash were the largest number on record since these anti-military and pro-TRT protests began.

No wonder, by Wednesday, Bangkok was rife with rumours arising from the recent swirl of events. They even forced some companies to send staff home early and caused the Thai stock market drop by 2.3 percent, reaching a two-week low.

The more widespread among them was the possibility of another coup as a response to the escalating tension. This fear spread late into the night despite repeated messages over the media by the military leaders for the public to ignore the scuttlebutt of a putsch.

‘'The situation now has grown very tense, specially after Thaksin's assets were frozen'' Laurent Malespine, who runs ‘Don't Blink', a Bangkok-based political research consultancy, told IPS. ‘'Right now there are people who want another coup to happen.''

In Thailand, there have been ‘'self-coups'' in the past or ‘'coups by the military leaders in power, launched against themselves to clear up a messy issue,'' he says. ‘'It is not a coup by an outside force.''