On Sunday morning, a bomb went off in front of a police apartment building in the Bannang Sata area in Thailand’s southern border province of Yala. It killed at least one person and hurt sixteen others.
The blast happened in front of a police station apartment in Bannang Sata around 10:30 a.m, not far from a market and the Bannang Sata district office.
The blast’s force broke glass windows and ceiling tiles in the apartment building and nearby homes. Because the government was afraid of more bomb threats, they put up a fence around the blast site.
Pol Lt Gen Piyawat Chalermsri, commissioner of Provincial Police Region 9, stated that the device was a gas cylinder concealed in a blue Toyota vehicle stolen from a government office on Saturday. After the explosion, it caught fire in Yala’s Betong area. Adjacent automobiles sustained damage.
After the explosion, Justice Minister Tawee Sodsong said that the dead person was 45-year-old teacher Rokiyoh Sarana, who was walking by when the bomb went off. She was born and raised in Bannang Sata.
Six of the 16 people hurt were police officers, and the other ten were regular people from the area. Broken glass and shrapnel hurt five people very badly. The hurt people also had chest pain. They got medical care at Bannangsata Hospital.
It was the first time this year that a car bomb went off in the far South.
Thailand’s Deep South
The violent rise of Thailand’s Deep South insurgency happened twenty years ago in January 2024. The war has been going on for more than a hundred years at a lower level.
Since January 2004, there have been more than 22,296 violent events, killing over 7,547 people and hurting 14,028 others. This includes the killing of Muslims by the army at the Krue-Se mosque and in the Tak Bai township.
The number of violent events each year (1,850 in 2012) started to go down in 2012 and has been going down every year since.
Thai states Pattani, Narathiwat, and Yala, as well as four districts of Songkhla province, are all in the “Deep South.” There is violence because of problems between different religions and ethnic groups (most of the people in the area are Muslims), because Buddhist Thailand is harsh, and because the area is very poor compared to other provinces.
