Suspected separatists decapitate Thai-Chinese rubber tapper

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.