Motorcycle gunmen have shot dead a police officer in southern Thailand, where a series of attacks have killed at least 14 security, government and religious figures since early January, police said. Sergeant Major Panya Darahim, a district police investigator, was gunned down by two attackers on a motorcycle in southern Narathiwat province. He was pronounced dead at hospital, a police commander said. "He was shot at around 8am by two attackers on a motorcycle as he was getting into his car after dropping off his wife at a nursery school in Sungai Padi district," Major General Khamronwit Thoopkrajang told AFP.
The attack appears part of a pattern of attacks that have rattled the deep south, a Muslim-majority region where a separatist movement has rumbled on for decades and until recently was considered too fractured to conduct well-coordinated attacks. The spate of violence erupted January 4 with a raid on an army depot in Narathiwat that killed four soldiers, and simultaneous attacks on 18 schools and two police checkpoints. Two bomb squad officers were killed the next day as they attempted to defuse a bomb in Pattani. Three monks were then hacked to death late last month in Narathiwat and Yala. Three policemen have also been killed in the region in similar attacks, while a government irrigation engineer was slashed to death Wednesday in Pattani. |