KUALA LUMPUR/BANGKOK, Sept 1: About 130 Muslims have abandoned their homes in Thailand’s troubled south, where suspected separatist militants killed a Muslim teacher and a Buddhist policeman on Thursday, to seek refuge in Malaysia.

The influx from Muslim-majority southern Thailand, where more than 800 people have been killed since a renewed separatist campaign erupted in January 2004, prompted an immediate promise of tighter security on the often-porous border.

Malaysia said on Thursday it was willing to consider temporary refuge to people fleeing southern Thailand if the unrest continued, the national Bernama news agency said.

“However, it’s not our intention to interfere with Thai domestic affairs,” Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar was quoted by Bernama as saying. “We will cooperate with the Thai authorities if they want their people who fled to return to Thailand.”

A Malaysian marine police official said his team would keep a 24-hour watch along the Sungai Kolok, the narrow river separating the two nations.

A policeman in Kelantan said this was the first time a large group of Thai Muslims had sought refuge in Malaysia from the violence and authorities fear the influx could grow if the violence continued.

The Malaysia representative for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Volker Turk, said his team would want to interview the Thais if they were genuinely fleeing violence.

“If indeed these people have fled the violence then that’s a concern,” he said, adding: “I am confident that the Malaysian authorities would not send people back to a situation of danger.”

Malaysian police said they had arrested 64 men, 24 women and 43 children in two mosques in the north Malaysian state of Kelantan for illegal entry. “We have handed them over to the immigration department,” a Kelantan police official told Reuters.

An immigration official said the Thais were being held for entering Malaysia without valid travel documents. “We have 14 days to investigate,” he said.

Bernama quoted one of the Thais, identified as Salleh, as saying his group had fled after the army entered their village in Narathiwat province and shot dead a village headman.

Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala provinces, all bordering Malaysia and populated largely by Malay-speaking Muslims, have been the focus of the militant campaign.

The Islamic studies teacher was shot dead by two men on a motorcycle as he left home in the Yala capital on Thursday, police said.

A Buddhist policeman died in a hospital after a bomb hit a convoy taking teachers to work in Narathiwat’s Sungai Padi district. One policeman and two teachers were wounded, police said.

Schools have been frequent targets of the militants as symbols of the government in faraway Bangkok and many teachers have been among the victims.

In Pattani, two militants shot dead another policeman at point-blank range, and set fire to a traffic kiosk, police said.

Around the same time, suspected militants set off three remote-controlled bombs almost simultaneously at Sungai Kolok, a southern Thai town once popular with Malaysian tourists, wounding at least 15 people, including a Malaysian, police said.

Sungai Kolok, once full of visitors swarming its bars and brothels, has been hit by at least three bombs since January 2004 and many Malaysians now avoid it.

Thailand’s far south was an independent sultanate called Pattani until Bangkok annexed it a century ago. Local people have never felt a part of overwhelmingly Buddhist Thailand.—Reuers