Bomb Explosion Kills 3 Rail Workers in Southern Thailand

Officials blamed separatist insurgents for a bomb explosion on a railroad track in southern Thailand on Tuesday, killing at least three railway workers and officials and injuring several others.

The bomb was planted a the same site of an explosion Saturday that derailed 11 of 20 cargo cars in Songkhla province without causing any casualties, according to railway officials.

During a visit to the scene, Lt. Gen. Santi Sakuntanak, the army chief in the Deep South, said, “While the railway officials were clearing the track, insurgents detonated another bomb about a hundred meters away from the first bomb blast.”

“That means the attackers calculated that after the first attack, officials would be arriving to inspect the scene and collect evidence, so they set off another bomb to kill people and destroy properties.”

The explosion was witnessed by Mr. Deeden Kongsom, the chief technician for Thailand’s State Railway.

“The bomb detonated as we walked away from the previous bomb site… “I saw my colleagues being tossed in various directions,” Deeden told Benarnews.

The bomb was planted between the railway stations of Klong-ngae and Padang Besar, on the outskirts of the insurgency-ridden Deep South, along a rail route that leads to the nearby Malaysian border.

So far, no insurgent groups have claimed responsibility for these attacks.

According to Lt. Gen. Santi, authorities must be vigilant in protecting areas that could be soft targets during the upcoming festival season.

“From now on, [we] must be extremely vigilant in business areas because the attackers may target tourist destinations not only in the Deep South but also Hat Yai, Satun, and Surat Thani,” he said to neighbouring districts and provinces.

The attack on Tuesday was the second in recent weeks in the southern border region to result in multiple casualties.

A massive explosion from a bomb-rigged pickup truck killed a police officer and injured dozens of others in Narathiwat province on November 22. According to officials, three children, including a one-year-old, were injured.

The bomb in that incident was aimed at a compound housing police officers and their families.

According to data updated through March 2022 by Deep South Watch, a local think tank, at least 7,344 people have been killed and 13,641 injured in violence across the mainly Muslim and Malay-speaking border region since a separatist insurgency resurfaced in January 2004.

The region along Thailand’s deep south border with Malaysia includes the provinces of Pattani, Narathiwat, and Yala, as well as the four districts of Songkhla.

In early 2020, government officials and representatives of the largest rebel group in the Deep South, Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN), began peace talks mediated by Malaysia.

These talks came after years of negotiations between the government and MARA Patani, an umbrella group that brought together insurgent groups from the Deep South, including BRN.

The recent talks between the Thai government and the most powerful rebel group in southern Thailand, the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN), have demonstrated how fragile and multilayered the peace process can be in one of Asia’s longest-running armed conflicts.

For the first time in the brutal decades of insurgency, both sides agreed to a Ramadan ceasefire this April, allowing unarmed rebels to visit their families.

The same calm was shattered two weeks later by a bombing carried out by the Patani United Liberation Organization (PULO), another separatist group in the deep south that had been excluded from the peace talks.

According to Deep South Watch, an NGO, the conflict parties in the insurgency, which has claimed over 7,300 lives since 2004, are currently at a crossroads.

Most violence is concentrated in the country’s three southernmost provinces, Narathiwat, Pattani, and Yala, where Muslims account for approximately 85% of the population.

Since the early twentieth century, Thailand’s predominantly Buddhist government has pursued an aggressive assimilation policy that Muslim Malays see as violating their cultural and religious identities.

In the 1960s, a separatist movement sought to establish the Muslim-majority region as an independent state. Since then, various ethnic Malay Muslim insurgent groups have emerged to fight for self-determination and independence from the Thai state.

Bomb Derails Freight Train in Southern Thailand

Bomb Derails Freight Train in Southern Thailand