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Troops and police killed more than 100 gun and machete-wielding Muslim youths in a three-hour mosque shoot-out on Wednesday, a day of carnage in Thailand’s restive south.
In Bangkok, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra called an emergency meeting of top security officials. Thaksin said, 107 ‘‘bandits’’ and five soldiers had died in the fighting, which started when gangs of young men launched dawn attacks on Army and police posts across the Muslim region. Army chief General Chaiyasidh Shinawatra said, the intelligence services had been tipped-off and they were ready and waiting for trouble.
Many of those involved in the assaults, which mark a major escalation in four months of violence in Thailand’s three southernmost provinces, were wearing black or dark green uniforms with red headbands.
Thaksin vowed to smash what he said were rings of troublemakers motivated purely by crime, rather than religion or ideology, in a region which was home to a low-key Muslim rebellion in the 1970s and 1980s.
‘‘We will uproot them, depriving them of a chance to allude to issues of separatism and religion. In the end, they were all bandits,’’ Thaksin said.
After a three-hour gun battle at a prominent mosque in the town of Pattani, soldiers were dragging bodies from the building for fear they might be rigged to booby traps, witnesses said. ‘‘We had no choice but to take decisive action and storm the place to wrap up operations as quickly as possible,’’ said the Army chief.
Television showed images of a sandbagged police post ablaze after one of the attacks.
Some of the dead rebels wore green T-shirts with messages in Arabic and the letters ‘‘JI’’ — a possible reference to Jemaah Islamiah, the group linked to the Al Qaeda and blamed for terror attacks across South-East Asia.
Bangkok has so far blamed the trouble on gangsters exploiting some disgruntled elements of the local Malay-speaking population, who feel few emotional ties to the predominantly Buddhist country.
‘‘Those who died must have believed they were dying for their religion,’’ said Ahmad Somboon Bualang of Pattani’s University of Prince Songkhla.
‘‘They must have had an ideology beyond separatism, otherwise why would they attack with their bare hands and swords?’’ he said.
A statement from the Thailand Army chief Chaiyasidh Shinawatra said: ‘‘Some of them were found to be carrying religious beads and written words of prayer used for instigating the misguided to carry out various illegal activities.’’
—(Reuters)
