Militants from the restive South who have slipped into Bangkok to study at universities had the potential to launch attacks in the capital, Defence Minister Boonrawd Somtas said yesterday.

"We cannot control them

as they exploit the liberty of students to move freely about Bangkok," General Boonrawd told reporters.

"We have intelligence units to take care of this matter but they might slip through our surveillance," he said.

Authorities are understood to be monitoring a group of students from Ramkhamhaeng University allegedly linked to the bombs in Bangkok on New Year's Eve.

But information about other universities in the capital with students from the South was unknown.

Chidchanok Rahimulla, an academic at the Prince of Songkhla University in Pattani, said enrolments by Muslim students from the far South has risen over this past year but he warned against jumping to premature conclusions about them.

"Some [students] may sympathise with the militants and their separatist ideology but it doesn't necessarily mean they are militant themselves," Chidchanok said.

"I believe their perception of the situation will expand as they will be exposed to the world outside of their community," he said. "Be-sides, active militants are not people who study at universities or colleges."

An exiled leader residing in Malaysia said more and more young people in the Malay-speaking South were interested in knowing about their own history - but took up a Patani-Malay nationalist sentiment.

He said their enrolment in university could be a positive thing, as this would bring up the issue of the Malay region and where it fitted in Thailand's context of a nation-state.

Boonrawd told Parliament during a session yesterday on the crisis in the deep South, the government had yet to contain the violence as the militants kept expanding their operations.

He blamed the government of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra for destroying the intelligence and communication network established by the Southern Border Province Admin-istrative Centre, which the previous administration had dissolved 2002.

The centre was reinstated two months ago.

Authorities had only succeeded in neutralising about 50 or a quarter of 200 villages rated as "red zone" areas that have many militants, in the three southernmost provinces Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat.

Boonrawd told Parliament the militants had deep roots in the region as most were reared in both religious and secular schools for more than a decade since they were young. He said there were some 1,000 schools, including Islamic boarding schools, which implanted anti-state sentiment in the young.

"The schools have taught

them anti-state and pro-Patani ideology since they were 12 years old and that paved the way for them to adopt militancy."

Boonrawd said about 1,000 of these youngsters had reached adulthood and were actively part of the insurgency and they had about 10,000 sympathisers and active supporters - people who militants could mobilise to make trouble and disturbances for the authorities.

Intelligence reports indicated that many key members met to plan strategies in Malaysia's Kelantan state then crossed the border to wreak havoc in the far South, he said.

National Intelligence Agency chief General Vaipot Srinual, who opened the motion in Parliament, said there were growing number of "two-faced people" helping to spur violence in the region.

"They pretend to be with us when they talk to officials but generate misperceptions when they associate with local people," he said.