Suspected separatists behead Buddhist ice cream vendor

Feb 1, 2007, 7:15 GMT

Bangkok - Suspected separatists in Thailand's majority Muslim province of Pattani on Thursday shot dead and then beheaded a Buddhist ice cream vendor, police said.

At 11 a.m. unknown assailants shot Virachai Utharaniyong, 45, in the back as he peddled his ice cream cart through a Muslim village on the outskirts of Pattani city, 730 kilometres south of Bangkok.

'After shooting him dead they chopped off his head and took it with them,' said Pattani Police Sub-Lieutenant Attapol Kunwongmannsoh, who inspected the scene of the crime.

'We questioned villagers but they all claimed not to have witnessed the slaying,' said Attapol in a telephone interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

It was believed the be the 18th beheading in the so-called deep South, comprising Narathiwat, Pattant and Yala provinces, since the violence intensified in the region three years ago.

Once called the independent Islamic sultanate of Pattani, the area was first conquered by Bangkok in 1786 and came under the direct rule of the Thai bureaucracy in 1902.

A separatist struggle against Thailand's predominantly Buddhist state has simmered on and off since, but took a more violent turn in January 2004, when militants attacked army bases and stole 300 guns.

More than 1,900 people have died in the area in clashes, revenge killings, bombings and beheadings over the past three years.

Pattani's decades-old separatist movement has been fuelled by the local population's sense of religious and cultural alienation from the predominantly Buddhist Thai state. More than 80 per cent of the two million people in the three-province region are Muslim.