Pattani, Thailand - Suspected separatists on Monday
decapitated a rubber tapper in Thailand's restive province of Yala,
in the latest apparent revenge killing, police said.
The decapitated body of Kim-siang sae Tang, 53, a Thai national of
Chinese decent, was found dumped inside a worker's hut in a rubber
plantation in Than-toh district of Yala province, 750 kilometres
south of Bangkok.
Police said the body had been burned and the head spiked on a
stick outside the cottage.
It was the 31st beheading in Thailand's deep South, comprising
Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala provinces, since January 2004, when the
region's struggle erupted after Muslim militants stole 300 weapons
from an army depot, prompting several reprisals on the insurgents.
The insurgents, an amorphous group of various Muslim militants
fighting for greater autonomy or complete independence from the
predominantly Buddhist state, have adopted eye-for-an-eye revenge
tactics in the past to combat any show of force by the authorities.
Since June 8, when unidentified assailants opened fire on a
Narathiwat mosque, killing 11 and injuring 13 people at evening
prayers, there has been an escalation in violence against non-Muslims
in the south.
Altogether 11 people have been slain since the mosque incident,
including a Buddhist monk who was shot dead while he collected alms
Friday morning.
Leaflets have been distributed in the region warning that revenge
would be exacted for the mosque slayings, which have been widely
blamed on the authorities although the outcome of an investigation
into the attack has yet to be concluded.
According to military sources in Pattani, attacks on the Thai
authorities and Thai-Buddhists in the region have been on the rise
since May 29, when the Songkhla provincial court cleared the military
of any responsibility for the October 2004 Tak Bai incident, in which
85 Muslim men died in army custody.
'Many Muslims down here, especially the relatives of the Tak Bai
victims, were unhappy with the verdict,' said one army officer, who
asked to remain anonymous.
The Songkhla Court ruled that military personnel were carrying
out their duties in the Tak Bai crackdown, in which 78 alleged
demonstrators suffocated after being stacked like logs on trucks
taking them to prison, and seven other died in a crackdown.
The court, ruling on a post-mortem inquest into the Tak Bai
incident, noted that the Thai authorities were acting under an
emergency law which shields officials from civil, criminal or
disciplinary liability arising from their actions on duty.
The incident, which outraged human rights activists and Muslim
communities around the world, also helped to inflame a separatist
struggle in the majority-Muslim deep South, which has simmered for
decades.
Some 3,500 people have died in the escalating violence in the deep
South over the past five years.
Although the region, which centuries ago was the independent
Islamic sultanate of Pattani, was conquered by Bangkok about 200
years ago, it has never wholly submitted to Bangkok's rule.
Analysts said the region's Muslim population, the majority of whom
speak a Malay dialect and follow Malay customs, feels alienated from
the predominantly Buddhist Thai state.
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