Three Muslim men were gunned down, while separatist insurgents set fire to 13 schools in Thailand's Muslim-majority south, police said Thursday. Two men were killed in separate drive-by shootings late Wednesday and mid-day Thursday in Yala, one of three insurgency-hit provinces bordering Malaysia, police said.
In neighbouring Narathiwat, gunmen killed a 54-year-old local government official in an ambush on his motorcycle early Thursday, police said. Thirteen soldiers were later injured by a bomb near a football field in Pattani province, leaving four of them in serious condition, police said.
A bomb also exploded near a Narathiwat vocational college, injuring a soldier. The blast came after insurgents torched 13 schools in almost simultaneous arson attacks in Yala and Pattani provinces late Wednesday, police added.
The latest arson attacks brought the number of schools torched by rebels to 200, while 77 teachers have been killed in the three-year insurgency, according to education officials in the region. Teachers and schools are often targeted by insurgents, who see them as trying to impose Buddhist Thai values on the Muslim and ethnic Malay region.
More than 2,200 people have been killed and thousands more wounded in separatist violence that erupted in the south in January 2004. The violence has escalated despite peace-building measures by the military-installed government which came to power following a coup in September 2006.
The region was once an autonomous sultanate, until the region was annexed by mainly Buddhist Thailand a century ago. Separatist unrest has erupted there periodically ever since.
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