Yala: A bomb explosion killed five defence volunteers, and a rubber tapper was shot dead in Thailand's restive deep south on Friday, police said, the latest violent incident in a region plagued for seven years by separatist unrest.
Suspected Muslim insurgents detonated a bomb buried in a road as a truck carrying six defence volunteers drove to the scene of a shooting at a rubber plantation during the night, in which a Buddhist man was shot dead.
Shootings designed as a trap
Five of the volunteers were killed and the other seriously wounded in the province of Narathiwat bordering Malaysia.
Rebels often carry out shootings as a trap to lure security forces into an ambush.
Bombs are buried in roads or close to the scene of shootings and detonated as groups of police or soldiers arrive to investigate.
Four rangers were wounded in a similar incident in Yala on Thursday when a bomb exploded under their vehicle as they rushed to the scene of a gunfight in a village where a man and his 5-year-old daughter were killed.
More than 4,600 people have been killed in violence since January 2004 in the once independent Malay Muslim region encompassing the Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat provinces, which were annexed by Thailand, then known as Siam, in 1909.
