Bombs in southern Thailand kill one police officer, wound seven
Roadside bombs in southern Thailand killed one police officer and wounded seven members of the security forces in a region scarred by a long-running Muslim separatist insurgency, police said on May 31.
The dead officer was part of a bomb disposal team that caught in a secondary blast while attending the site of an earlier bomb attack on Saturday night, police Lieutenant Preecha Prachumchai told Reuters. Four of his colleagues were wounded in the explosion.
The first bomb had wounded three paramilitary rangers out on patrol in the Paklor district of Pattani province, the officer said.
Since 2004, more than 6,500 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in violence in Thailand's three southernmost provinces, where members of the local Muslim Malay population are waging an insurgency against rule by Buddhist-majority Thailand.