Thai police blame insurgents for pregnant woman’s death

By Max Constant

BANGKOK (AA) - Police have blamed insurgents in Thailand’s troubled south for a shooting in which a pregnant woman was killed and another woman injured in the latest violence to hit the region.

Police Captain Noravit Thongsod, deputy-investigator at Panare police station in majority Muslim Pattani province, told Anadolu Agency on Sunday, “the two women, 26- and 28-years-old, were buying food on the roadside… when two men arrived on a motorcycle, approached them and shot at them before fleeing on their vehicle.”

The woman who succumbed to her injuries was eight-months pregnant.

Doctors undertook a surgical operation in hopes of saving her baby, but the fetus had stopped breathing, the Bangkok Post reported.

Col. Yuthanam Phetmuang, deputy spokesman of the Internal Security Operational Command -- the main government domestic security agency -- for the southern region, was quoted as saying, “we strongly condemn this attack against innocent people and would like all concerned organizations to do the same.”

Police suspect insurgents were behind the attack, which came after several weeks of increased violence in the region.

Earlier this month, a car bomb explosion injured five people in neighboring Pattani province.

On Oct. 24, a bomb exploded near a noodle shop in Pattani, killing a 60-year-old woman and injuring 21 others, while four days later two men riding a motorcycle shot at a car in front of an education office in Mayo district.

A 49-year-old female teacher driving the vehicle died in the attack while a female civil servant was injured.

The two attackers -- both captured on security cameras -- left a note near the car with the words “for you who killed Malayu people” -- a local term that refers to ethnic Malay Muslims.

The southern insurgency -- which has destabilized the three southernmost provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat for decades -- is rooted in a century-old ethno-cultural conflict between Malay Muslims living in the region and the Thai central state where Buddhism is considered the de-facto national religion.

Armed insurgent groups were formed in the 1960s after the then-military dictatorship tried to interfere in Islamic schools, but the insurgency faded in the 1990s.

In 2004, a rejuvenated armed movement -- composed of numerous local cells of fighters loosely grouped around the National Revolutionary Front, or BRN -- emerged.

After the military seized power in May 2014, the junta continued the overthrown elected civilian government’s policy of holding peace talks with insurgent groups.

But a recent report on the Thai south by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, regarded this dialogue as having “foundered” because both sides “prefer hostilities to compromise”.

“The National Council for Peace and Order [NCPO], which seized power in the 2014 coup, professes to support dialogue to end the insurgency but avoids commitment,” the report said, referring to the ruling junta by its official name.