Tue 26 October, 2004 11:47
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Thailand (Reuters) - At least 84 people were killed in a crush in southern Thailand yesterday after police and troops fired shots to disperse a crowd of Muslim demonstrators outside a police station, a justice ministry official says.Police on Tuesday stepped up efforts to find the organisers of the bloody rally and started questioning 300 protesters held at a military barracks in Pattani, 1,100 km (700 miles) south of Bangkok, after Monday's clashes with security forces, the worst violence to hit the region near the Malaysian border since April.
The predominantly Buddhist government says the violence, which has claimed at least 360 lives since January, appears to be fuelled by Muslim separatism, but it has yet to come up with a coherent plan to put an end to it.
"We are interviewing them to find out who persuaded them to join and how they were mobilised," southern police chief Manote Graiwong told a Bangkok radio station.
Many of the demonstrators, who massed outside a police station demanding the release of six villagers accused of handing over government-issue shotguns to militants, were armed and appeared to have taken drugs, he said.
"We had to use force otherwise they could have ransacked the police station and set fire to it," Manote said.
During a six-hour standoff, troops and police in riot gear fired live ammunition, as well as water cannon and tear gas, to disperse 1,500 protesters. Shots were also fired from the crowd, officials said.
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra praised security officials, but shed no light on who or what was behind the unrest in the region where a handful of Muslim separatist rebels have fought a low-key insurgency for decades.
Thailand's far south is home to most of its Muslims, who make up 10 percent of the mainly Buddhist nation's 63 million people.
"They have done a great job," Thaksin told reporters in Bangkok late on Monday after returning from an emergency trip to the region.
He said tough action had to be taken against the protesters. "They really set out to cause trouble so we had to take drastic action against them," Thaksin said.
The prime minister is coming under increasing pressure to resolve the unrest, which analysts fear could turn the region into a fertile recruiting ground for militant networks, such as the al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiah.
"It's all building up to the point where we're in serious danger of what is so far a rather serious law and order issue turning into a broader insurgency," said Steve Wilford of Singapore-based Control Risks Group.
Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar expressed his sadness at the latest incident and said Kuala Lumpur was monitoring the situation closely.
WEAPONS HAUL
As frogmen trawled through a river close to the scene, police said they had found seven automatic rifles, a pistol, four hand grenades and machetes discarded by the protesters.
Senior security officials admitted they had known that a rally was being planned a couple of days in advance but not the exact target. They could not figure out how several thousand people from different towns had massed at one location.
"If we had not set up road blocks on various highways, there could have been 10,000 people," Siwa Saengmanee, a senior Interior Ministry official, told a Bangkok radio station.
Despite a curfew imposed in eight districts of Narathiwat province after the clashes, militants set fire to a school building and burned tyres on several highways.
The unrest erupted in January when gunmen raided an army camp and killed four soldiers before escaping with about 300 assault rifles.
Since then, there have been almost daily attacks on officials or symbols of the central government in the region which lies along the border with predominantly Muslim Malaysia.
Victims have included both Muslims and Buddhists. On the bloodiest day, April 28, security forces killed 108 Muslim militants who attacked police posts across the three southernmost provinces.