Three Muslim villagers and two militants have died in the latest violence in Thailand's insurgency-plagued southern provinces, police said Sunday. Suspected militants shot and killed a 39-year-old Muslim as he was standing in front of his house in Pattani province late Saturday, they said.
After midnight, a group of insurgents also shot and killed two Muslim men, aged 25 and 20, while they were riding home by motorcycle in Yala province. A third man was wounded in the attack. Early Sunday, army and police forces raided a house containing suspected rebels in Yala, and a 32-year-old militant was killed in an exchange of fire that lasted more than ten minutes, the police said.
In a second raid on a house in Yala, combined forces killed another fighter.
More than 4,000 people - both Buddhists and Muslims - have been killed and thousands more wounded since a separatist Islamic insurgency erupted in January 2004 in Thailand's southernmost provinces bordering Malaysia.
Tensions have simmered in the mainly Muslim region - formerly an autonomous Malay Muslim sultanate - since it was annexed in 1902 by Buddhist-majority Thailand.