Suspected Islamic rebels killed four Buddhist state officials on Wednesday in a roadside gun attack in Thailand's rebellious Muslim south, police said.In a separate incident, six people were wounded when a bomb went off in a restaurant in the city of Yala.
Four militants on two motorcycles attacked the officials in their car with a pistol and an M-16 rifle. One man and two women were killed instantly in a village in Pattani, one of the southern provinces caught up in a separatist insurgency.
Another woman official died in hospital, police said.
After the shooting, the militants hid a small bomb in a car and detonated it after cameramen and photographers finished filming, a Thai television reporter told Reuters by telephone.
"Ten minutes after I finished filming, a bomb went off in the car and I was just about 10 metres away," said Channel 7 reporter Khemin Guagoon.
The violence in Thailand doesn't get nearly the coverage of the Arab Israeli conflict, and yet the common thread is Islamists denying all others the right to live peacefully. The Islamists seek their own state carved out of Southern Thailand, and are more than willing to slaughter innocents and state officials to achieve those goals.
The current Thai government has tried appeasement alternating with crackdowns (just like Musharraf in Pakistan), but it has failed to stop the violence. If anything, the level of violence has intensified because the Islamists realize that the Thai government is unwilling to do what is necessary to stop the Islamists. (HT rantburg)
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