Pattani, Thailand- Suspected separatist insurgents continued to terrorize Thailand's deep South on Wednesday with a series of pre-dawn explosions and attacks, leaving at least two Thai Buddhists dead, one of whom was beheaded. In Sisakorn district of Narathiwat province, 800 kilometres south of Bangkok, unknown assailants shot dead two Thai Buddhist road
construction workers at 4 am Wednesday in their sleeping shelter and then decapitated one of them, nicknamed "Duk," said Narathiwat Police Chief Major General Yongyudh Charoenwanit.
Duk was believed to be the 25th beheading in the trouble-torn deep South, comprising Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala provinces, since a long simmering separatist struggle took a more militant turn in January, 2004, when Muslim militants stormed an army arms depot and stole 300 war weapons.
Over the past three years and four months an estimated 2,100 people have lost their lives in clashes, crackdowns and retaliatory killings, bombings, arson attacks and beheadings.
Three bombs were simultaneously detonated at
electricity poles in Tak Bai, Narathiwat, at 5 am Wednesday, causing a blackout in the district,. Tak Bai is notorious as the site of a government crackdown on Thai Muslim protestors in October 24, 2004 that left 84 dead, 78 of them from suffocation after being tied up and piled into army trucks.
A fourth bomb exploded shortly afterwards in Tak Bai when Narathiwat Deputy Police Chief Colonel Noppodol Pueksopol was inspecting the scene. Noppodol was seriously injured in the blast, losing his leg, Yongyudh said.
Another two bombs damaged electricty poles in Pattani city at around the same time, leaving the provincial capital in a pre-dawn darkness.
The attacks came at a time when Thailand's government, led by military-appointed Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont, is coming under increasing pressure to get tough with the southern insurgency.
Attacks on Thai Buddhists living in the deep South have intensified in recent months despite efforts by Surayud to adopt a more conciliatory approach to the conflict than his predecessor, Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted by a military coup on September 19.
Analysts said they believe the insurgents - a hodgepodge of different separatist groups, Muslim militants and criminals - have been intensifying their attacks to try to trigger a tough government crackdown on Thai Muslims that would help the insurgents solidify the
support of the local people.
More than 80 per cent of the 2 million people living in Thailand's deep South are Muslim of ethnic Malay decent who have closer cultural affinities with neighbouring
Malaysia than with the predominantly Buddhist Thai kingdom.
The region was an independent Islamic sultanate known as Pattani for hundreds of years before it was conquered by
Bangkok in 1786. The border provinces came under direct rule of the Thai bureaucracy in 1902.
A separatist struggle has simmered in the region for the past five to six decades, fuelled by the local population's sense of religious and cultural alienation from Thailand.
