A suspected Islamic militant beheaded a Buddhist clothes vendor in southern Thailand on Wednesday, police said, the eighth decapitation in 18 months of separatist unrest.
Police said the 43-year-old victim had been sitting outside a tea-shop at midday in Narathiwat, one of the three violence-plagued southern border provinces, when a gunman approached on a motorbike and shot him in the back.
The vendor, originally from northern Thailand, stumbled into the teashop, but was chased by his attacker who grabbed him and chopped his head off.
The gunman then fled with an accomplice on a motorbike with the head wrapped up in a plastic sack, the shop’s owner told police.
“When we got there, we saw the dead body lying in the shop. We didn’t find any weapons, only cartridge cases,” a policeman, who did not wish to be identified, told Reuters. The head was found 1.2 miles away.
On Sunday, militants suspected of waging a separatist campaign against the government of predominantly Buddhist Thailand beheaded two migrant workers from Laos, only a few days after police found the headless body of a 65-year-old man.
In the latter case, a note beside the man’s severed head warned police that two civilians would be killed for every Muslim arrested without evidence.
More than 700 people have been killed in the unrest in the Muslim-majority southern provinces of Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani, home to a low-key separatist insurgency in the 1970s and 1980s.
The government has imposed martial law on parts of the region since violence flared anew in January 2004, at the same time as offering an olive branch of lavish development aid.
