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Thai protesters piled up "like bricks" - survivor
28 Oct 2004 11:16:42 GMT
Source: Reuters
(Updates with further quotes throughout)

By Nopporn Wong-Anan

PATTANI, Thailand, Oct 28 (Reuters) - One of nearly 1,300 Thai Muslims arrested after clashes with security forces said on Thursday police and soldiers beat protesters and piled them up "like bricks" for a five-hour truck ride to an army camp.

"Everyone had to lie down in the back. We were lying one on top of another with no space to breathe," the man, a rubber tapper in his 30s, said from his hospital bed in Pattani, 1,100 km (700 miles) south of Bangkok.

"I thought I was going to die. Luckily, I'm still alive. I was in the middle of the truck, where I could catch some air," the man said. He did not want to be identified.

Another patient, 20-year-old Maudin Awae, who said he was in the second of five layers of bodies in another truck, told of similar horrors.

"A lot of people cried for help. They asked to stand up but the soldiers did not let us. They stamped on us," Maudin told Reuters, adding that at least 10 people on his truck died.

These accounts -- some of the first survivor testimonies to emerge from Monday's tragedy -- run counter to the government's insistence that security forces did not use excessive force at the protest in Thailand's restive, mainly Muslim deep south.

Seventy eight Muslim men died of suffocation after hundreds were packed into army trucks after the demonstration, which was initially quelled by troops and police with tear gas, water cannon and live ammunition.

Chermsak Pinthong, a Bangkok senator who flew into Pattani on a fact-finding mission, said he spoke to a detainee at the army camp who said troops taunted the Muslim men, telling them they were going to die.

"He said they were crying that they were about to die, and the soldiers shouted back 'Go ahead and die so you know what it's like in hell'." They then stamped on the pile of bodies," Chermsak quoted the man as saying.

KICKINGS, BEATINGS

The unnamed man, who said he was admitted to hospital on Tuesday because he could not move his shoulder, said he was only caught up in the riot because police were blocking the road outside Narathiwat's Takbai police station.

"I got out of my truck. I stopped and watched the rally and after a few minutes, the clashes started. Police opened fire.

"I saw someone next to me get shot. He looked dead," the man said. Soldiers and police then beat protesters as they started to round them up, he said.

"They used the butts of their guns to hit them in the face while they were lying down. I got hit by a gun butt on the back of my neck several times. They kicked me too. I can't hear well."

An intravenous drip was inserted in his left arm, and bruises could be seen on his shins and on both cheek bones. His bruised, blackened right arm was swollen to near double its normal size.

In the bed next to him lay a man with a bandaged leg. In another bed, a man was recovering from a gunshot wound, a huge bruise visible below his right eye.

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has admitted the army made mistakes leading to the suffocation of the detainees, but he defended the action of security forces, which he described as "gentle measures".

The protesters, who had been stripped semi-naked and had their hands tied behind their backs, were loaded at gun-point onto high-sided army trucks for transport to Pattani military base, a journey of around 100 km (60 miles).

When they arrived at the camp, the man said he saw five dead people in his truck. The dead were those closest to the driver's cab, he said.

Officials at Pattani's main hospital said 33 wounded were being treated in four hospitals in the area, including 25 patients in its own wards, which were being guarded by soldiers to deter visitors.

The chair of the senate foreign relations committee Kraisak Choonhavan, who also went on a fact-finding tour of Pattani, was appalled by his findings.

"These people have been treated worse than animals. This is an atrocity," he said.

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Thu Oct 28 11:37:05 2004