Death toll in South tops 1,700
Security officials patrol the city centre in Yala following a string of coordinated bomb attacks on commercial banks last Thursday.
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The death toll in the protracted deep-South insurgency has topped 1,700, according to a local scholar.
The increased use of explosives since mid-2005 had led to the rising body count, he said."Over the past 32 months, 1,730 people have lost their lives and 2,513 people have been injured. "Altogether, 4,243 have been physically affected by the violence," Asst Prof Srisomphop Chitpiromsri said yesterday. Srisomphop is deputy dean of the research and community development faculty of political science at Songkhla Nakarin University's Pattani campus. He was speaking at a seminar organised by the university, the Issara News Agency, the Thai Journalists Association, the Southern Teachers Network and the Thai Southern Journalists Association. "Individual violent incidents amount to 5,460, with Narathiwat leading with 2,074. Pattani is next with 1,656 incidents and Yala has had 1,412 incidents. Songkhla was last with 318 events," he added. Srisomphop said there had been 647 fewer violent incidents in the past eight months of this year compared with previous years. But the use of explosives had increased dramatically since June 2005. The organisers of the seminar established a knowledge centre to track deep-South violence.
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