Four people were killed in a late-night attack by suspected Muslim insurgents on a military outpost in Thailand’s violence-wracked south, authorities said yesterday.
The attack comes as anger increases over the case of a Muslim rebel suspect who was left in a critical condition after spending several hours in a notorious army interrogation unit.
The 15-year conflict in the Malay-Muslim majority “Deep South” has left more than 7,000 people dead, but garners little global attention.
Photo: AFP
Rebels seeking autonomy for the culturally distinct “Deep South” have been fighting the Buddhist-majority Thai state, which colonized the area more than a century ago.
Late on Tuesday, militants struck a remote army base in Pattani Province, throwing grenades and laying down nearly an hour of automatic fire, an army spokesman told reporters.
“Four people were killed, including an army sergeant-major, two defense volunteers and a villager,” Colonel Thanawee Suwannarat said.
The rebels stole five machine guns, burned tires and scattered spikes on the road as they fled to hamper any chase, he added.
Confirming the death toll, a Pattani police officer said that, in one of the deadliest single incidents to hit the region in months, two other people were sent to the hospital in critical condition.
The attack comes four days after suspect Abdulloh Esormusor was left unconscious after being arrested under martial law and taken to a notorious military camp in Pattani.
Thailand’s army is investigating how the 34-year-old came to be hospitalized with brain swelling hours after arriving at the Inkayuth camp.
An army statement said the camp doctor recorded the suspect arriving in good health, but said he was later found unconscious after being held in the “interrogation center.”
Inkayuth is the army’s biggest detention center in the south, where rebel suspects are taken for questioning and held under the emergency laws governing the conflict-scarred region.
The army has vowed to punish anyone found guilty of abuse.
However, critics say impunity reigns in the south — no military personnel have ever been successfully prosecuted for abuses over the conflict.
Sunai Phasuk of Human Rights Watch speculated that Tuesday’s attack “was in retaliation” for the treatment of Abdulloh.
An umbrella group representing some of the rebel groups said they suspected “foul play” in Abdulloh’s case and called for an international probe.
Insurgents operating in small, secretive village-level cells carry out near-daily bomb attacks and shootings in the south, including the murder of Buddhist civilians and Muslims perceived to be collaborating with the state.
Attacks are often a swift and targeted kickback against arrests or deaths of suspected rebels or Muslim civilians.
Packed crowds in India celebrating their cricket team’s victory ended in a deadly stampede on Wednesday, with 11 mainly young fans crushed to death, the local state’s chief minister said. Joyous cricket fans had come out to celebrate and welcome home their heroes, Royal Challengers Bengaluru, after they beat Punjab Kings in a roller-coaster Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket final on Tuesday night. However, the euphoria of the vast crowds in the southern tech city of Bengaluru ended in disaster, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra calling it “absolutely heartrending.” Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said most of the deceased are young, with 11 dead
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
RSS