Suspected Muslim rebels in southern Thailand attack government office and shoots official in head

Suspected Muslim insurgents attacked police and a government office in Thailand’s deep south on Tuesday, killing one official as they seized hostages, police said.

More than a dozen armed men dressed in black seized 13 civil servants in a local government office in Narathiwat province, police investigator Wongduan Kamsri said. The head of the office was shot three times in the head and the surviving hostages fled, Wongduan added.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks. But Thailand’s three southernmost provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat, all majority Muslim, have been plagued by unrest since 2004, when a long dormant separatist rebellion resurfaced.

As police travelled to the scene of Tuesday’s attack, gunmen opened fire on one vehicle and tried to detonate a bomb planted in the road as another car passed over it, Wongduan said, adding that no officers were injured.

“This incident was well planned and coordinated by the insurgents,” said Pramote Prom-in, a spokesman for the military-run Internal Security Operations Command.

The region abutting the Malaysian border was an independent Malay Muslim sultanate a century ago before being annexed by Thailand, an otherwise predominantly Buddhist state.