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Car bomb raises worries in restive
Thai south
YALA, Thailand -
Violence escalated in Thailand's Muslim-majority
south after an unprecedented car bomb exploded in
a busy nightlife district in Sungai Kolok on
Thursday evening, killing six people and injuring
up to 40 just two hours after Prime Minister
Thaksin Shinawatra cut short a trip to the restive
region, officials and police said.
The
bomb was planted in a pickup truck outside the
Marina Hotel in Sungai Kolok, a town on the
Malaysian border popular with Thai and Malaysian
tourists. The attack is the deadliest single
bombing to have hit the deep south, a region that
for more than a year has been gripped by a
campaign of violence which has claimed about 600
lives.
In a live interview with
broadcaster iTV on Thursday, Narathiwat provincial
Governor Pracha Taerat said some 40 people were
injured in the blast. One of the injured died the
following day at Sungai Kolok hospital, taking the
toll to six, a local police officer told Agence
France-Presse (AFP).
Pracha said
Thursday's bomb shows a new level of destruction
in the region. "We did not expect this kind of car
bomb. It is unprecedented in Thailand," he said.
It was also the fifth bomb to rock southern
Thailand in 48 hours. Pracha told reporters that
the scale of the explosion and the methods used by
the assailants marked a worrying new twist in the
violence.
"This was a huge car bomb, with
almost 100 kilograms of explosives," the governor
said, adding that about four shop fronts were
destroyed in the blast detonated in an area of
town crowded with open-air beer bars. Sungai Kolok
has been the scene of three other major blasts
since last March.
A series of smaller
attacks over the past year have been blamed on
Islamic separatists, but Thursday's car bomb
raised questions about involvement by foreign
militants. Most of the bombs up to this point have
been smaller and attached to motorbikes.
No one has taken responsibility for the
attack, but Pracha compared the bomb to those used
by insurgents in Iraq and said it "shows that
those behind this attack are not ordinary".
The blast came just hours after the prime
minister cut short a visit to the region during
which he unveiled a highly controversial plan to
block state funding for more than 350 villages
deemed to be prone to violence and sympathetic to
separatists.
The proposed initiative, the
first of its kind since the anti-communist
struggle of the 1970s and 1980s, could cut off
financial help from development funds to villages
in the deep south classified as "red zones", areas
plagued with violence, said Thaksin, who made the
announcement while speaking to villagers in
Narathiwat, the province where the blast occurred
and where most of the "red" villages are located.
Thaksin said it was unlikely that foreign
terrorist elements were involved in the attack but
admitted it was aimed at putting pressure on his
administration, AFP reported. "The perpetrators
were the offspring of those [suspected separatist
militants] with outstanding arrest warrants and
their aim was to put pressure on the government,"
he told reporters in Bangkok.
(AFX) |
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