Three students killed in attack on Thailand school

Saba Yoi, Thailand: At least three pupils were killed in an attack on a school in Thailand's south, police said yesterday, sparking a protest in a region where sectarian tensions have recently flared.

Local police said suspected separatists first launched a bomb attack at the Islamic boarding school in Songkhla province late Saturday, before opening fire inside the building, killing three boys.

However, about 400 local villagers have blamed Thai armed forces for the slayings and staged a protest, blocking the road leading to Pornoh Bamrungsart School and preventing police from investigating the crime scene.

"A 12-year-old and two 14-year-olds were confirmed dead," said local police chief Thammasak Wasaksiri. "Eight students were treated at hospitals," Colonel Suwit Sawangwong, from the border patrol police said.

Separatist violence

At least 2,000 people have been killed in separatist violence that has gripped the provinces of Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani since January 2004, with the bloodshed occasionally seeping into neighbouring Songkhla.

Songkhla's police chief major general Paitoon Pattanasophon said authorities were trying to negotiate with the protesters, so they could get to the scene of the crime and determine what had happened.

"A few hundred people are still blocking the road," said Paitoon. "They are throwing spikes on the road leading to the village."

Thammasak said the deaths occurred at the scene of the explosion, but a hospital treating the wounded had a contradictory complaint - that the pupils suffered gunshot wounds after suspected militants burst into a dormitory and sprayed bullets.

"(The students) said people came into their dormitory while some of them were sleeping or relaxing, before opening fire," a spokesperson at Pattani's Khok Pho hospital said.

The attack occurred in Songkhla's Saba Yoi district, which neighbours Yaha district in Yala province, where the massacre of nine Buddhists on Wednesday prompted the army to impose a partial curfew in the Muslim-majority south.

Shortly after the execution-style killing of the Buddhist commuters, bombs were hurled into a mosque and a teashop, killing three Muslims and inflaming tensions across the region bordering Malaysia.

Thammasak said the villagers blocking the road believed government forces were behind the school raid, but he insisted rebels were responsible.

Teachers and schools are often targeted by insurgents, who see them as trying to impose Buddhist Thai values on the Muslim-majority region. However, the school targeted on Saturday was an Islamic religious school. "It is impossible that officials did it," said Thammasak. "This violence was carried out by a group who wants to create problems, the same group who carried out acts of violence in the other three provinces."

Authorities accuse the rebels of targeting Muslims to provoke sectarian tensions. Violence has recently escalated in the region bordering Malaysia, despite a raft of peace-building measures proposed by Thailand's military-backed government. A string of coordinated bomb blasts across the southernmost region last month killed nine and injured 44.