Authorities hold 19 religious teachers following boat trip
Police continued to detain 19 religious teachers from a Yala school and a boat driver for questioning after they returned from an island in Satun province.
Police suspect the teachers may have been involved in the ongoing violence in the deep South. They said the teachers would be held for at least seven days in accordance with the emergency law, which allows people to be held without charge for up to 30 days. The teachers belong to Thammawithaya. The founder of the school, Spaing Basoh, is on the run after being accused of masterminding violence in the South. A lawyer at the Muslim Lawyer club said the group went to Sam Island in Satun for a workshop on education plans, and were not involved in the region's ongoing violence. Nidir Waba, chairman of the Religious Private School Association, said his group would seek further information about the teachers and the school before offering to help them. "I would like to urge concerned officials to be cautious in handling the case. If the group is innocent, it would damage the government's standing," he said. More than 1,200 people have been killed since the beginning of 2004 when a military camp in Narathiwat was raided, four soldiers killed and 300 weapons stolen. The government blames separatists for the almost daily attacks in the three southernmost provinces: Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat. In an unrelated event, the Justice Ministry's Department of Special Investigation (DSI) yesterday issued arrest warrants for two Thai Muslim exiles, amid growing criticism that authorities have not done enough to curb the flow of "anti-Thailand" information on the Internet. The DSI's Pol Colonel Kanaphon Yangyuen said arrest warrants had been issued for Chipley Buthra Che-ngoh and Abdul Rosah Che-ngoh, accusing them of lese-majesty. The two live in exile in the Middle East and Sweden, respectively. Kanaphon said the pair was responsible for www.pulo.org and www.manusaya.com websites, which carry anti-Kingdom statements and attack the government over its handling of violence in the Malay-speaking South. Kanaphon said the DSI had succeeded in getting the host of these websites to comply with the government's request to shut them down. The warrants announced yesterday are the latest in a series of spats between Thais living abroad and the government amid a growth in international attention to the violence in the South.
The Nation Yala
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