Published on October 27, 2004 - Protesters ‘suffocated in military trucks’ | More than 60 still missing

Seventy-eight protesters died of suffocation or from convulsions after they were arrested and herded into military trucks for detention following a riot on Monday in Muslim-dominated Narathiwat province, it was disclosed yesterday.

Autopsies performed on the victims found no bullet wounds on their bodies, just bruises and small cuts on their faces, said Dr Pornthip Rojanasunand, deputy director of the Justice Ministry's Central Institute of Forensic Science.

She told a press conference in Pattani that all the victims had died at about midnight on Monday.

She inspected the bodies yesterday morning.

Six protesters were killed earlier and 17 others were injured during clashes with government security forces, according to official estimates.

About 1,300 protesters were arrested and sent to detention at a military camp in the neighbouring province of Pattani.

The military camp is about 120 kilometres away from the protest site.

A military source said the trucks arrived at the camp at about 1am yesterday.

He said the vehicles were covered with tarpaulins, which could lead to poor ventilation and might cause death.

Pornthip said most of the dead were found at the front of the trucks, just behind the cab.

A hasty press conference was called at a hotel in Pattani yesterday evening following rumours that as many as 100 protesters were killed during clashes with security forces outside Tak Bai district police station.

The government released no official figures on the casualties and no government officials have made any comment about the incident.

In dismissing the rumour yesterday, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said "some deaths were possible" among those arrested due to weakness as a result of religious fasting.

However, he had no comment to make about the 78 deaths disclosed by Pornthip.

Thaksin said the victims shot on Monday were not killed by government security forces. He suggested that they had been hit by stray bullets.

A source said Thaksin and General Sirichai Thanyasiri, chairman of the Southern Border Provinces Peace-building Command, agreed yesterday that a medical official should break the news about the 78 additional deaths after they met to discuss the matter.

In separate press conferences about the incident, neither Sirichai nor the Defence Ministry mentioned the additional 78 deaths.

The riot occurred on Monday when more than 1,000 people gathered outside Tak Bai police station in Narathiwat to demand the unconditional release of six village defence volunteers arrested on suspicion of giving Islamic militants their government-issued weapons.

The authorities said they had decided to use force after the protest turned violent. Virtually all of the Narathiwat protesters were Muslims.

Pornthip said the autopsies showed that about 80 per cent of the 78 deaths were caused by suffocation, and the rest by convulsion.

She explained that the deaths were probably the result of the protesters being forced into a small space on the trucks, while others were crushed to death.

But Pornthip did not rule out the possibility that the suffocation could have been caused by another party blocking the nostrils and mouths of the protesters to prevent them from breathing.

"We can't tell for sure if anyone blocked their nostrils or mouths," she said.

Maj-General Sinchai Nutsathit, deputy commander of the Fourth Army Region, and Justice Ministry deputy permanent secretary Manit Suthaporn were also present at yesterday's press conference in Pattani.

Manit said the arrested protesters were put into the military trucks "in an orderly fashion" and that they were not thrown into the vehicles.

He said it took between five and six hours for the trucks to arrive at the military camp in Pattani.

Thaksin told yesterday's Cabinet meeting that there were conflicting media reports about the numbers of dead in Monday's incident, said Government Spokesman Jakrapob Penkair.

Cabinet members expressed concern that the "inaccurate reports" could lead to misunderstandings.

Jakrapob said government security forces had fired warning shots into the air while cracking down on the protesters, dismissing media reports that they had shot at the demonstrators.

Without mentioning the exact number of deaths, the spokesman said there were three main causes for the deaths: over-exhaustion due to fasting, the influence of unidentified drugs, and accidents during the crackdown.

A source at Pattani Hospital said that a number of the arrested protesters had been sent to hospital suffering from low blood pressure between Monday night and yesterday morning.