112 die in clashes with Thai troops: 15 security installations attacked
PATTANI, April 28: Troops and police killed 112 Muslims on Wednesday, including more than 30 in a three-hour mosque shootout, on a day of carnage in Thailand's restive south.
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said 107 "bandits" and five soldiers had died in the fighting, which started, according to Thai officials, when groups of mainly young men launched dawn attacks on army and police posts across the predominantly Muslim region.
Army chief Gen Chaiyasidh Shinawatra said intelligence services had been tipped off about the attacks, meaning security forces were ready and waiting for trouble. "Our intelligence operations have been beefed up a lot with the help of local people, some of whom have supplied us with tips and information," he said at a news conference.
Many of those involved in the assaults, which mark a major escalation in four months of violence in Thailand's three southernmost provinces, were wearing black or dark green uniforms with bright red headbands. Their motive remains a mystery.
"Judging from their dead bodies, they had taken narcotics. Their smell suggested the use of drug-laced cough drops," Deputy Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh told reporters. Mr Thaksin vowed to smash what he said were rings of troublemakers motivated purely by crime, rather than by religion or ideology, in a region that saw a low-key Muslim rebellion in the 1970s and 1980s.
But the widespread and coordinated nature of the attacks on about 15 security installations across the provinces bordering Malaysia suggested that forces other than pure gang sterism or drugs were at work, analysts said. "We will uproot them, depriving them of a chance to allude to issues of separatism and religion. In the end, they were all bandits," Mr Thaksin told reporters.
After a three-hour gunbattle at a well-known mosque near the provincial town of Pattani, soldiers were dragging bodies from the bullet-riddled building for fear they might be rigged to booby traps, witnesses said.
Teargas still hung in the air. "We had no choice but to take decisive action and storm the place to wrap up our operations as quickly as possible," said army head Chaiyasidh.
Two more battalions of troops had been sent to an area already crawling with military personnel, army officials said. Elsewhere in the forested, hilly region, television showed a sandbagged police post ablaze after one of the attacks. Burning motorcycles were scattered in and around the compound and two corpses lay in the entrance hallway.
Television also showed wounded border soldiers, their green battle fatigues soaked in blood, being hauled out of trucks onto hospital stretchers. At least one soldier was seen lying dead in the rubble of a destroyed building.
Thailand's three southernmost provinces have been hit by a wave of shootings, bombings and arson attacks that had already claimed more than 60 lives since a Jan 4 raid on an army barracks that left four soldiers dead.
In Bangkok, where the stock market fell 1.2 per cent on fears of escalating violence, the prime minister called an emergency meeting of top security officials. The Thai baht fell to a four-month low.
Despite a huge military clampdown in the south, the violence has shown few signs of abating, leading analysts to fear that the region's disaffected Muslim youth might become a fertile breeding ground for the likes of Jemaah Islamiah or Al Qaeda.
POLICY VACUUM: In what looks increasingly like a policy vacuum, Bangkok has so far blamed the trouble on gangsters exploiting disgruntled elements of the south's Malay-speaking population, who feel few emotional ties to the predominantly Buddhist country.
"Those who died must have believed they were dying for their religion," said Ahmad Somboon Bualang of Pattani's University of Prince Songkhla. "They must have had an ideology beyond separatism, otherwise why would they attack with their bare hands and swords?"
The army chief alleged in a statement many of the attackers had been paid and pumped up with drugs. "Some of them were found to be carrying religious beads and written words of prayer used for instigating the misguided to carry out various illegal activities," he alleged.
Other analysts said the authorities must come clean as quickly as possible to stave off accusations of using undue force. "This is very shocking," said Bukhoree Yeema, a political scientist in the southern province of Songkhla. "If the government does not produce a clear-cut explanation, there will be massive repercussions from the Muslim community."
ADVICE TO BRITONS: Britain on Wednesday advised its nationals not to visit the southern provinces of Thailand unless their trips were essential. "On April 28 there were attacks on security forces in 10 locations in the far southern provinces of Pattani, Yalan, Narathiwat and Songkhla," the foreign office said on its Internet site.
"More than 100 militants and five members of the security forces are reported to have been killed. We recommend against all non-essential travel to these four provinces." Earlier the Danish government issued similar advice. On April 9 the foreign office called on visitors to Thailand to be vigilant because of the threat of terrorist attacks. Reuters/AFP
