BANGKOK (AFP) - A 60-year-old Buddhist man has been killed and seven people injured in a blast at a market in southern Thailand, the fourth in less than 24 hours in the violence-wracked Muslim-majority area, police said.
The dead man was named as Sompong Nookhao, a food seller at the market, while a seven-month-old baby boy suffering shrapnel wounds from the remote-controlled device that exploded during busy early morning shopping Saturday.
Three of the injured were in a critical condition after the blast at 7:00 am (0000 GMT) in the Than To district of Yala province but the baby was out of danger, according to police.
The scene of the blast was cordoned off as forensic teams were brought in to investigate.
"A remote control bomb was placed on the ground at a food stall inside the market," said Lieutenant Colonel Jarin Charowan, deputy superintendent of Than To police.
Three apparently coordinated bomb attacks hit the neighbouring province of Narathiwat on Friday evening.
At least 16 people were injured, four seriously, in the first blast in a crowded restaurant in the provincial capital of Narathiwat.
The bomb was planted by two men posing as customers and exploded five minutes later after they rode off on a motorcycle, witnesses said.
Two other bombs went off within two hours of the first but nobody was injured, according to officials.
Tensions have increased in the region since 87 Muslim protesters died on October 25 after security forces broke up a riot at Tak Bai in Narathiwat province.
Most of the victims died of suffocation after hundreds of men were arrested, tied up and piled into the backs of trucks.
More than 540 people have died during a separatist-inspired insurgency since January this year.
Analysts say separatists, religious extremists and disaffected Muslims who have long complained of discrimination by the Thai authorities are behind the violence.
Security forces have flooded into the region amid signs that attacks by militants have switched from security forces to "soft" Buddhist targets, including Buddhist workers and monks.
But security forces continue to sustain casualties. Police sergeant Koyrudin Moroh, 32, was shot three times by motorcycle gunmen after taking his wife to work in the southern province of Pattani. He survived and is being treated in hospital.
In his weekly radio address Saturday, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra vowed a two-pronged approach of negotiations and a hardline crackdown to try to solve the problems in the region.
"The situation in the south deteriorated last night as there were many attacks," Thaksin said.
"We are willing to use peaceful means but we have to use both negotiations and a crackdown since there are four to five civilians killed every day," he said.
Thaksin, who cancelled his trip to this month's APEC summit in Chile because of the strife in the south, has reversed his decision and is now likely to attend, according to officials.
11/13/2004 - 08:09 GMT - AFP