Indonesians may have trained Thai militants - army
Source: Reuters
BANGKOK, May 14 (Reuters) - Militants from Indonesia may have trained southern Thai Muslims to decapitate or use other grisly tactics in their bloody separatist campaign, an Army spokesman said on Monday as another Buddhist man was shot and beheaded. They also used video clips of beheadings in the Middle East available on the Internet as part of their training of Thai militants in jungle camps, Colonel Acra Tiproch said. "You really need to know certain bones of the necks to behead someone and Thais don't really know how," Acra. "You need someone to be trained overseas or foreign trainers to teach them how." The interrogation of captured insurgents suggested that foreign trainers, suspected to be Indonesian, were present in Thailand giving training through translators, he said. More than 2,100 people have been killed in three years of separatist insurgency in the Malay-speaking far south annexed by Buddhist Thailand a century ago. Apart from roadside bombs and drive-by shootings, militants sometimes behead their victims or set fire to their bodies after they are shot. On Monday, militants used M-16 rifle to kill a Buddhist couple at a rubber plantation in Yala province and walked away with the husband's head, the 22nd decapitation over the past three years, police said. A few hours earlier, militants killed a Muslim couple riding a motorcycle to a rubber plantation in another village in Yala province, police said. Despite the violence and growing calls from the Buddhist majority elsewhere in Thailand for more drastic actions, Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont insisted on Saturday his government remained committed to a peaceful resolution of the conflict.
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