Thailand, April 21: A grenade attack in Thailand’s troubled south Wednesday killed one policeman and injured 43 others, officials said.
Two men riding a motorcycle tossed the hand grenade towards 50 police officers as they received a morning briefing from their commander at the Pattani provincial police station.
A police spokesman said the blast killed a sergeant and that two of the 43 injured are were a critical condition.
Meanwhile, a 40-year-old Muslim man was shot dead in an ambush by suspected militants in Narathiwat province on Tuesday evening, police said.
A six-year separatist insurgency in Thailand’s restive Muslim-majority southern provinces bordering Malaysia has left more than 4,000 people dead.
The region was an autonomous Malay Muslim sultanate until it was annexed in 1902 by mainly Buddhist Thailand and tensions have bubbled there ever since, escalating into the current insurgency in January 2004.
—Agencies