Dr Pornthip Rojanasunand, director of the Justice Ministry's Forensic Science Institute, said yesterday she would investigate a burial site in the southern province of Pattani where about 300 corpses have been discovered, the vast majority of which do not appear to have died from natural causes.

Pornthip said she was alarmed that there were no police records to account for the bodies in Pattani's Muang district.

She told The Nation yesterday that it was standard operating procedure for the police to document all deaths.

The bodies were not dumped in a mass grave but were placed individually in the ground without coffins.

Pornthip did not specify the exact location where the 300 corpses were found, but local rescue workers from the Por Tek Tung Foundation said they believed she was referring to a section of the Talubok Cemetery where unclaimed bodies from Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat are buried.

The officer, who asked not to be named, said most of the bodies were foreign fishermen working on Thai-owned trawlers in Pattani.

He said about 300 bodies had been delivered to this section of Talubok over the past year and added that most of the corpses were found on the bank of the Pattani River where the trawlers are docked.

Most of the fishermen in Pattani, as well as other fishing ports in Thailand, are foreign workers from neighbouring Burma and Cambodia.

Locals said the men have a tendency to get drunk and fight, especially after a long stint out in the ocean.

Pornthip said it would be another month before her team could conduct any autopsies at the site.