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King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit of Thailand.

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.

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.