Jihad training videos from the Middle East captured in southern Thailand may be inspiring local Muslim insurgents to carry out beheadings, officials said yesterday.
About 30 people, both Buddhist and Muslim, have been beheaded since the revival of a separatist Muslim insurgency in early 2004 in Thailand's southernmost provinces.
The latest victim was a Buddhist man whose headless body was found in a rubber plantation yesterday alongside his wife, who was also killed but not decapitated, police Lieutenant Than Sirikhan said.
Thai Army spokesman Colonel Akara Thiprote said he believed the local insurgents were copying brutal terrorist tactics, including beheadings, that are portrayed on jihad, or holy war, training videos from the Middle East, probably Iraq.
Such videos were seized during a raid earlier this year on an insurgent training camp in a remote jungle area of Thanto district in Yala province bordering Malaysia, Akara told The Associated Press.
Akara said that some foreign trainers were also present in southern Thailand. He declined to identify their nationalities but said their accents and dress suggested they were from Indonesia.
The Thai military claims to have captured some foreign militants but has not revealed their names, nationalities or other details about them.
Thai military officers in the south have periodically claimed that a small number of foreigners were involved in the insurgency, which has taken the lives of more than 2,200 people. But they have yet to offer concrete evidence.
"The insurgent trainers are people from this region, but they are not Thai. Thais would never teach such cruel killing," Akara said.
The al-Qaeda-linked militant group Jemaah Islamiyah has been blamed for several terror plots and strikes in Southeast Asia in recent years, including the 2002 nightclub bombings that killed 202 people on Indonesia's Bali island.
Hundreds of militants have been arrested. But experts say Jemaah Islamiyah has several key members at large, and is still capable of waging attacks.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS