Thailand checks possible role of Indonesians in insurgency

Thailand checks possible role of Indonesians in insurgency

Agencies, Pattani, Thailand

The military sent reinforcements to violence-wracked southern Thailand on Tuesday as authorities investigated the possibility that seven of more than 100 suspected Muslim militants killed last week were foreign fighters.

Seven of those gunned down by security forces were not Thais, an army commander said in what could be the first solid evidence that fighters from neighboring countries have joined a Muslim insurgency in this mainly Buddhist country.

"There's a real danger that militants from Malaysia, Indonesia or the Arab world will now become involved in Thailand's internal conflict," Anusorn Limmanee, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok told the Time magazine.

Lt. Gen. Pisarn Wattanawongkiri said the dead foreigners were among a group of bodies that remained unclaimed by relatives after the assaults. He refused to give details or identify their nationalities.

Other Thai officials said the army was checking whether they were from Indonesia, which has experienced Islamic-related separatism in nearby Aceh, as well as al-Qaeda-linked terrorist attacks and religious fighting in other provinces.

But separatist rebels in Indonesia's Aceh province denied on Tuesday that they'd played any role in last week's fighting between Muslim militants and government forces in southern Thailand.

Thai authorities have said they're investigating whether some of the militants were from Aceh.

Bakthiar Abdullah, a spokesman for the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), said that the group had never taken part in any military action outside Aceh, and that none of its member had been involved in the Muslim insurgents' attacks on Thai military posts.

"We have our own problems in our homeland," he said in a telephone interview from Stockholm, Sweden, where his group maintains a government-in-exile. "Why we should intervene in the problems of other regions, including southern Thailand?"

Thai authorities have said they were checking if the seven were from Aceh, a province of 4 million people on northern Sumatra island, where guerrillas have been fighting for independence for almost three decades.

Thai immigration officials have said seven Indonesians had arrived in the country on April 18 and 19 through a border crossing between Thailand and Malaysia, and were not registered as having left the country.

On Tuesday, Buddhist monks and Muslim clerics held an interfaith ceremony at an army camp to pray for peace in southern Thailand and for the souls of the victims of last week's violence. The army organized the ceremony at the Ingkayut Boriharn army camp outside Pattani to assuage public anger among the southern Muslims.

Meanwhile, a southern Thai separatist fighter told Time magazine (May 1 edition) in a rare interview, an excerpt of which was made available to The Jakarta Post by the magazine, that his group New p.u.l.o was responsible for the January raid on an army depot and also the torching of several state schools in the same month.

"We cannot compromise. We are not Thai people. We are Malay- speaking Muslims. The Thai government is not interested in talking to us. The fight will go on. We want independence. Nothing less than that," Babak Lukman, the leader of the New p.u.l.o, told Time.

New p.u.l.o is one of the six main separatist groups that have recently pooled their resources under a single banner, Bersatu, the Malay word for united.

In a separate development, the Royal Thai Embassy in Jakarta said in a press release sent to the Post on Tuesday that the perpetrators of the coordinated attacks in southern Thailand on April 28 were linked to the group that carried out the raid on the military depot on Jan. 4.

"The perpetrators were under the influence of drugs and were instigated to resort to violence," the embassy said.

The embassy said the incident and clashes were not in any way related to sectarian or religious conflicts since the group of attackers were linked to the same group of 10 militants arrested earlier, which comprised both Thai Buddhists and Muslims.