2 Thai soldiers beheaded in south

SUSPECTED separatists shot dead two militia volunteers yesterday in a rubber plantation in the violence-plagued province of Pattani, before slicing their throats and burning their bodies.

The ambush occurred in Yanrang district of Pattani, 750 km south of Bangkok, a notorious hotbed for insurgents.

"The ambush was easy to pull off because it happened deep in the jungle," Pattani Police Chief Major General Triwin Ingkeow said.

The assailants, armed with AK 47s, shot dead Nihasan Niarae, 30, and Chuea Choktirat, 56, as they drove through a rubber plantation on a motorcycle.

They then decapitated Nihasan, a Thai-Muslim, and sliced Chuea's throat, poured petrol on both bodies and burned them. Both men were volunteer militia.

It was the latest atrocity in the five-year-old conflict in Thailand's deep South that has cost the state an estimated 109 billion baht ($4.5 billion) and lost 3,287 lives.

Deep South Watch, an independent research group that monitors the conflict, has put the southern death toll since January 2004 at 3,287 lives, of whom 1,788 were Thai Muslims and 1,348 Thai Buddhists, with another 5,405 people wounded, The Nation newspaper reported.

Of the 300,000 Thai Buddhists who used to inhabit the region, some 70,000 have left since 2004.

Violence in Thailand's three southernmost, Muslim-majority provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala escalated after separatists raided an army depot in January 2004, killing four soldiers and making off with 300 weapons.

The incident sparked a series of brutal government crackdowns on the region's long-simmering separatist movement, which turned much of the 2 million population, 80 per cent of whom are Muslim, against the central government.

Although the region, which centuries ago was the independent Islamic sultanate of Pattani, was conquered by Bangkok about 200 years ago, it has never wholly submitted to Thai rule.

Analysts say the region's Muslim population, the majority of whom speak a Malay dialect and follow Malay customs, feel alienated from the Buddhist Thai state. DPA