Three men killed, one woman wounded in Thai south

Suspected Islamic separatist militants have shot dead three men and wounded a woman in separate attacks, police said Friday.

Thai soldiers patrol a road in the country's restive southern province of Narathiwat in mid September. Suspected Islamic separatist militants have shot dead three men and wounded a woman in separate attacks, police said Friday.

They said a 40-year-old Muslim man who sat on a local police committee was shot dead as he left Friday prayers at a mosque in the Krongpinang district of troubled Yala province.

Police said the gunmen were also wounded but managed to flee the scene by motorbike.

Early Friday morning police found the body of a 29-year-old Muslim villager who appeared to have died from a gunshot wound, on a roadside in the Yarang district of neighbouring Pattani province.

They said the previous evening a 37-year-old Muslim man had been killed and his wife seriously wounded in a shooting at their home in Yala province.

A bitter separatist insurgency in Thailand's Muslim-majority south has claimed more than 3,900 lives over the past five years.

The shadowy militants target both Buddhists and Muslims, with victims ranging from teachers and government officials to rubber plantation workers.

The insurgency erupted in January 2004 but tensions have simmered in the region, formerly an autonomous Malay Muslim sultanate, since it was annexed by predominantly Buddhist Thailand in 1902.