An insurgent attack in Narathiwat, one of Thailand’s predominantly Muslim southern provinces, left four people including an eight-year-old boy dead, and two other children wounded yesterday, police said.
Days after a deal was reached with the Thai government to establish a safety zone, shots were fired into a pickup truck in Rueso village in Narathiwat early on Thursday, said Rueso police chief Col. Ruangsak Buadang.
The truck was being driven by an aide to the village chief who, along with his wife and sister-in-law, was taking their eight-year-old son and two other children to school.
“An unknown number of insurgents fired shots into the truck, killing all four and injuring two other children,” Ruangsak said.
A decades-old separatist insurgency in the Muslim-majority southern provinces of Yala, Pattani, and Narathiwat has claimed more than 6,500 lives since it escalated in 2004, according to independent monitoring group Deep South Watch.
The attack followed a deal struck earlier this week between the government and MARA Patani, a long-standing umbrella group that claims to speak for the insurgents. The talks were held in neighboring Malaysia.
In a statement on Tuesday, MARA Patani said that the Joint Working Group-Peace Dialogue Process had approved and adopted a general framework for a “safety zone” where fighting would be off-limits within five districts in the three southern provinces.
The government has said the safety-zone deal was the most progress that had been made in more than two years of negotiations. Talks between the government and the insurgents began in 2013 under then-Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, but were stalled after the military overthrew her government in 2014.
Col. Yuthanam Phetmuang, a spokesman for the military’s Internal Security Operations Command, condemned the attack.
“This is a barbaric action,” Yuthanam said.
