Three Muslim students including a 12-year-old boy were killed when suspected separatist rebels launched an attack on an Islamic school in Thailand's south, while gunmen slew three Buddhists in a separate attack police said yesterday.
Local police chief Thammasak Wasasiri said an explosion hit the boarding school in Songkhla Province on Saturday night, before militants opened fire inside the building. He said that three students aged 12, 14 and 17 were killed.
"All three of those who died were boys," he said, adding that officials had previously mistaken the 14-year-old for a girl because of his name.
Another seven students were injured, he added.
Thammasak said that the victims died in the explosion, but a hospital treating the wounded said the pupils had suffered gunshot wounds after suspected militants burst into a dormitory and sprayed sleeping pupils with bullets.
The exact circumstances of the school killings remained unclear because hundreds of local villagers were blocking the road to Pornoh Bamrungsart school, accusing Thai army rangers of being behind the slayings, police said.
"They are throwing spikes on the road leading to the village," said Songkhla's police chief, Major General Paitoon Pattanasophon.
He said the authorities were attempting to negotiate with the protesters, but for the time being they were preventing police from investigating the scene of the crime.
The attack occurred in Songkhla's Saba Yoi district, which neighbors Yaha district in Yala Province, where the massacre of nine Buddhists on Wednesday prompted the army to impose a partial curfew in the Muslim-majority south.
Yesterday, attackers shot dead a man and two women, all Buddhists, in another part of Saba Yoi.
The man, a rubber tapper, and a mother and daughter, taking a break from work at a charcoal furnace, were killed by gunmen on motorcycles, police said.
At least 2,000 people have been killed in separatist violence that has gripped Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani provinces since January 2004, with the bloodshed occasionally seeping into neighboring Songkhla.
A spokesperson at Pattani's Khok Pho hospital said the injured pupils had been sent there to be treated for gunshot wounds, added the students were around 16 and 17 years old.
"They said people came into their dormitory while some of them were sleeping or relaxing, before spraying them with gunfire," the spokesperson said.
Thammasak said the villagers blocking the road believed government forces were behind the raid, but he insisted Islamic rebels were responsible.
"This violence was carried out by a group who wants to create problems, the same group who carried out acts of violence in the other three provinces," the police chief said.
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