Police Col. Pramot Juichuay, deputy investigator at Khokpo district police station in Pattani province, told Anadolu Agency, “a remote-controlled bomb placed under the last carriage of the Sungai Kolok-Hat Yai train exploded when the train was crossing the railway station of Khokpo”.
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Arson attacks and bombings in Prachuap Khiri Khan and six other provinces on August 11 and 12 claimed four lives, and last week a auto bomb in Pattani caused two more deaths.
The three wounded people included two train workers and a female passenger.
Southern Thailand, which has a majority Muslim population in the predominantly Buddhist country, has for years been in the grip of a separatist insurgency. “The peace talks will not be cancelled”, he told the media when met at Government House in Bangkok, adding that Gen Aksara Kerdphol (Thai army’s advisory board chairperson) would head Bangkok’s team to the talks.
A decades-old insurgency in the deep south of predominately Buddhist Thailand flared in 2004 and more than 6,500 people have been killed since then, according to the independent monitoring group Deep South Watch. Thai officials repeatedly said talks would not be held without peace and that they would not be pressured into talking, amid speculation that the bombings and arson attacks that grabbed headlines were carried out by southern Thailand insurgents to force the government back to the negotiating table.
No-one has claimed responsibility for the bombing spree but analysts say it bore the hallmarks of ethnic Malay Muslim insurgents.
The blast occurred three weeks after a series of explosions hit three of Thailand’s most popular tourist resorts and a town in the south, killing four people and wounding dozens.
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But officers insist it is too early to call the tourist town bombings an extension of the southern rebellion, suggesting the men could have been hired by other opponents of Thailand’s military government.
