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This weekend they chose to play dumb as they carried out a pre-dawn raid on the Pattani office of the Working Group on Justice for Peace, a human rights outfit that has been critical of the security forces' conduct in the restive South, where the ongoing insurgency has claimed more than 3,200 lives over the last four years.

According to the Working Group, about twenty security officials took part in the raid, going through computer files and documents.

The Working Group is led by Ankana Neelaphaijit, the wife of Somchai Neelaphaijit, a Muslim human rights lawyer who was abducted by rogue police officers in March 2004. He has not been seen since and is presumed to be dead.

Pol Lt Colonel Prawet Suthiprapa, who led the weekend raid, said the authorities had not specifically targeted the office but had been searching the entire area after getting a report insurgents were hiding there.

"The search was conducted according to the law and we left after a few hours when we did not find anything," Prawet said. He cited the Emergency Law, which permits the security forces to raid premises without a court warrant. As expected, the officers didn't find anything incriminating and so they left the area empty-handed.

Pathetic would be an understatement if one were to describe Lt. Colonel Prawet's response to this incident. He even had the audacity to tell the staff at the Working Group that insurgents may be looking to infiltrate local NGOs and that they should keep a look out. Excuse us, but Bangkokian can't help but question the timing of the raid, especially against an organisation that has been critical of and vocal against the authorities' bad practices in the region. If anything, the raid on the Working Group's Pattani office comes close to qualifying as harassment.

Too often our security officials complain about the difficulty of working in the violence-plagued region and ask for public sympathy, especially when it comes to budget allocations to acquire expensive equipment. But at the same time, numerous accounts of torture, abduction and target killing have been documented. And we still see this kind of intimidation. If the authorities are going to raid a human rights office that is known for being critical of the state agencies for torturing citizens, they had better have a good explanation and good evidence. Sorry, but "I just happened to be there and the law is on my side" just won't cut it.