Wednesday, April 28, 2004
At least 95 killed in southern Thailand violence
Agencies Bangkok, April 28
The death toll from violence in Thailand's Muslim south on Wednesday has risen to 95, including 93 attackers who mounted a series of dawn raids on police and army checkpoints, officials said.
The killings in dawn clashes between black-clad young men and security forces took place in Thailand's restive Muslim south when armed gangs raided police posts in a sharp escalation of four months of violence. Two soldiers and two policemen also died after the gangs wielding guns, swords and machetes launched the early morning raids on security posts across the troubled region, home to a low-key separatist rebellion in the 1970s and 1980s
Major Chitnart Bunnothok, spokesman for the Fourth Army which patrols the troubled region, said 93 attackers were killed, 12 were injured and one was arrested.
"The toll is likely to go higher because we have not yet cleared all the areas," he told AFP, referring to 10 locations where dawn gun battles were staged. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said the toll among security forces was low because the attackers were only armed with machetes and a few guns.
"Two security forces have died and nine are injured," he told reporters. Authorities said fighting was continuing at a mosque in Pattani province where rebels were holed up."We have sealed off the mosque in order to get them alive so we can question them and know their real motives," said Deputy Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, who is responsible for security matters.
Thailand's three southernmost provinces have been hit by a wave of shootings, bombings and arson attacks that had claimed at least 60 lives since a January 4 raid on an army barracks that left four soldiers dead. "They attacked five of our police booths in Yala province this morning and we killed 22 of them," provincial police chief Colonel Prinya Kwanyuen told Reuters.
The largely Muslim province of Yala is 1,300 km (780 miles) south of the capital, Bangkok.
An Interior Ministry official said the attackers were killed in raids across the three southern provinces, including in Pattani province, where a battle was still raging between troops and gunmen holed up in a mosque.
Local television showed heavily armed police and troops taking up positions in rural areas, as well as wounded soldiers from the nearby Malaysian border being unloaded from trucks onto hospital stretchers.
At least one dead soldier was shown lying in the wreckage of a destroyed building.
RISING VIOLENCE
Despite a huge military clampdown in the south, the violence has shown few signs of abating, leading analysts to fear the region's disaffected Muslim youth might become a fertile breeding ground for the likes of Osama bin Laden's Al- Qaeda network.
Bangkok has so far blamed the trouble on gangsters exploiting disgruntled elements of the local Malay-speaking population who feel few emotional ties to the predominantly Buddhist country and its distant capital.
However, Yala Governor Boonyasidh Suwannarat said the coordination of attacks at around 5.30 am (2230 GMT Tuesday), and the way the assailants were armed, suggested a degree of training.
"This morning showed that they have reached the stage of being confident enough to reveal themselves. Many of them were wearing white or red headbands as identification," he said.
"The type of knives they carried showed that they must have been well trained."
The prime minister, due to travel to the troubled region next week, called an emergency meeting of security officials.
© Hindustan Times Ltd. 2004.