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.
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