Violence on the rise in Southern Thailand
Three people were shot dead and three security officials wounded in gun and bomb attacks by suspected militants in Thailand’s troubled Deep South, police said on Tuesday. The incidents took place in Pattani, one of three rebellious Malay Muslim provinces where nearly 3,500 people have been killed in violence since 2004.
A Buddhist rubber tapper and his wife were shot on their way to work in the province’s Khok Pho district early on Tuesday by attackers armed with assault rifles. The incident took place in Pattani, one of the three Muslim-majority provinces in Thailand’s south.
The attacks come amid a spike in violence during a five-year insurgency in the area that has left at least 3,700 people dead.
Ethnic Malay rebels waged a low-level separatist struggle against the Thai state in the 1970s and 1980s, but that was settled with an amnesty for militants.
The violence restarted in January 2004 with a brazen raid on an army base, where militants looted more than 400 rifles, only a few of which have been recovered. Most of the violence in Thailand’s south has been blamed by authorities on Muslim armed separatist groups.
The fighters in Thailand’s southern provinces have not specifically stated their motives, but they are thought to be fighting to establish an independent state in the three Muslim-majority provinces.