More bombs hit Thailand’s largely Muslim south on Saturday, killing a shopper in a mainly Buddhist town and wounding 14 as Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra vowed to resolve the crisis.
“We really wished to solve the problems by peaceful means. But some people have still used violent ways, so we have to use both ways,” Thaksin said in his weekly radio address.
Provincial governors in the south would consult community heads, including Muslim leaders, on what to do, he said.
At least 28 people, almost all of them Buddhists, have been killed since Oct. 25 when security forces shot dead seven Muslim demonstrators in the town of Tak Bai in Narathiwat province and a further 78 died after being detained, most from suffocation in overcrowded army trucks.
The Tak Bai deaths prompted warnings from Muslim clerics and analysts of possible reprisal attacks.
Buddhists appeared to be the targets of Saturday’s bombings.
An elderly Buddhist man died when a bomb exploded in a bustling market in the largely Buddhist town of Tan Toh in the predominantly Muslim province of Yala, police said.
“The bomb exploded about 7 a.m. and killed one Buddhist man. Eight people have now been injured,” said an officer at Tan Toh police station, close to the scene.
He said the bomb was detonated by cellphone.
The violence was not contained just within Yala. In nearby Pattani province, a police sergeant was shot twice while driving home on Saturday and a bomb exploded in Narathiwat province, where another was defused, police said.
The Narathiwat bomb exploded near a bridge being built to link the province to Malaysia and wounded six people, including two soldiers and two policemen, they said.
In the province’s Bajoh district, a bomb weighing 44 lbs., filled with dynamite and fertilizer and also designed to be triggered by mobile phone was found near the police station, police said.
A bomb squad switched off mobile phone signals in the area and defused the device.
Another bomb placed in front of the district’s police station exploded, but no one was injured.
Trouble in the Malay-speaking area erupted on Jan. 4, when gunmen killed four soldiers in a raid on an army camp and made off with more than 300 M-16 assault rifles.
Almost 500 people have been killed in violence in the south this year.
