Fourteen people have been injured in one of two bomb blasts to strike Thailand's restive Muslim-majority south, police said, while a Buddhist teacher was shot dead in another attack. With the violence that has killed more than 540 people this year showing no sign of abating, a remote control bomb exploded at dinnertime in a crowded restaurant in the capital of Narathiwat province, a police spokesman said. "Initially we have 14 people injured from the blast," he said, adding that four victims were in a critical condition. The policeman said the bomb exploded at 6:20pm (local time) in the Ungmor restaurant five minutes after a witness saw two men posing as clients plant it in the restaurant before riding away on a motorbike. | The Motorbikes Of Doom strike again! |
Some 40 minutes later a second device went off in a general store at Tak Bai district, where 87 Muslims were killed during and after a riot last month. The blast caused no injuries. The bomb attacks followed the slaying earlier in the day of a Buddhist martial arts teacher. Police said the 45-year-old teacher from a Yala sports school was gunned down while returning to his home from a funeral. | Uh oh, they gunned down the master, I've seen that movie. Some where, students are swearing Dire Revenge. |
The shooting came amid media reports on Friday that an independent commission investigating the deaths of the 87 Muslims protesters had accused some security force members of firing directly into the crowd. Commission member Isma-ae Ali told the Bangkok Post that gunshot wounds on seven of those killed in rioting at Tak Bai suggested not all security force members had fired in the air as the government had claimed. However, the inquiry team is focusing primarily on 78 protesters who were rounded up by security forces, piled into trucks and who died largely through suffocation after the riot. The team's head, former parliamentary ombudsman Pichet Sunthornpipit, reportedly said the team had also been appalled to learn that as many as 23 protesters had suffocated in a single truck. The commission's investigation is not expected to be completed until next month. With attacks continuing almost daily, defence volunteers in three southern villages had started returning guns to authorities saying they feared being targeted by Islamic militants, the Nation newspaper reported on Friday. Some 4,000 shotguns have been handed out to village officials by the Government in a bid to fend of a wave of hit-and-run attacks aimed mostly at security forces, state officials, Buddhist civilians and monks. | So you prefer being a unarmed target? Each to his own, I guess. |
Muslims make up only four per cent of the Thai population but are in a majority in four southern provinces. A separatist insurgency in the south has continued sporadically for decades and sparked into life again in January with a raid on an army depot by militants who killed four soldiers and looted hundreds of weapons. |