Thailand's former queen Sirikit dies aged 93

Queen Sirikit, the mother of Thailand’s King Vajiralongkorn, has died aged 93.

She passed away “peacefully” in a Bangkok hospital at 21:21 local time (14:21 GMT) on Friday, according to the Thai Royal Household Bureau.

Sirikit had “suffered several illnesses” while in hospital since 2019, including a blood infection this month, it added.

For more than six decades, Queen Sirikit was married to Thailand’s longest-reigning monarch King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who died in 2016.

King Vajiralongkorn has ordered the Thai Royal Household Bureau to organise a royal funeral, the statement added.

Queen Sirikit’s body will lie in state at the Grand Palace’s Dusit Thorne Hall in Bangkok, according to the palace.

Thai royal family members will also observe a year of mourning.

Queen Sirikit met her future husband, King Bhumibol, while studying music in Paris, where her father was stationed as Thai ambassador to France.

“It was hate at first sight,” she said in a 1980 BBC documentary about the Thai monarchy, Soul of a Nation, adding that he had arrived late to their first meeting.

“Because he said he would arrive at four o’clock in the afternoon. He arrived at seven o’clock, kept me standing there, practising curtsy and curtsy,” she said.

The couple married on 28 April 1950, just a week before King Bhumibol was crowned in Bangkok.

As a young couple in the 1960s, Queen Sirikit and King Bhumibol travelled around the world, meeting US president Dwight Eisenhower, the late Queen Elizabeth II – as well as Elvis Presley.

During that decade, she frequently made international best dressed lists.

In the rare 1980 interview with the BBC, she also described the relationship between the monarchy and people in Thailand, which continues to observe strict lese-majeste laws forbidding insult of the monarchy.

She said: “Kings and queens of Thailand have always been in close contact with the people and they usually regard the king as the father of the nation.

“That is why we do not have much private life, because we are considered father and mother of the nation.”

She was seen as a key maternal figure for the country, with her birthday, 12 August, marked as Mother’s Day since 1976.

In 2008, she attended the funeral of an anti-government protester killed in violent clashes with police.

Queen Sirikit suffered a stroke in 2012, after which she was rarely seen in public.

She is survived by her son and three daughters.