Bangkok - Suspected separatists in Thailand's majority
Muslim province of Pattani on Thursday shot dead and then beheaded a
Buddhist ice cream vendor, police said.
At 11 a.m. unknown assailants shot Virachai Utharaniyong, 45, in
the back as he peddled his ice cream cart through a Muslim village on
the outskirts of Pattani city, 730 kilometres south of Bangkok.
'After shooting him dead they chopped off his head and took it
with them,' said Pattani Police Sub-Lieutenant Attapol
Kunwongmannsoh, who inspected the scene of the crime.
'We questioned villagers but they all claimed not to have
witnessed the slaying,' said Attapol in a telephone interview with
Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
It was believed the be the 18th beheading in the so-called deep
South, comprising Narathiwat, Pattant and Yala provinces, since the
violence intensified in the region three years ago.
Once called the independent Islamic sultanate of Pattani, the area
was first conquered by Bangkok in 1786 and came under the direct rule
of the Thai bureaucracy in 1902.
A separatist struggle against Thailand's predominantly Buddhist
state has simmered on and off since, but took a more violent turn in
January 2004, when militants attacked army bases and stole 300 guns.
More than 1,900 people have died in the area in clashes, revenge
killings, bombings and beheadings over the past three years.
Pattani's decades-old separatist movement has been fuelled by the
local population's sense of religious and cultural alienation from
the predominantly Buddhist Thai state. More than 80 per cent of the
two million people in the three-province region are Muslim.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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