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BANGKOK : Thailand grappled Friday with an alarming escalation of violence in the Muslim-majority south after an unprecedented car bomb that killed six people just hours after Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra had left the region.
The bomb also injured 44 people, up to five critically, when it detonated Thursday night inside a pickup truck parked next to a busy hotel in Sungai Kolok, a town on the Malaysian border.
"One of the injured died this morning at Sungai Kolok hospital," taking the toll to six, a police officer in the town told AFP.
The attack was the deadliest single bombing in a campaign of violence that has gripped the Muslim-dominated deep south for the past 13 months and claimed about 600 lives.
A small bomb exploded Friday in neighbouring Yala province, slightly injuring two soldiers assigned to provide protection for teachers, police said.
But while the embattled premier acknowledged the unrest had taken a turn for the worse and was likely to continue, he refused to categorise it as a descent into civil war.
"The violence has escalated but not to the extent of a civil war," Thaksin told reporters in Bangkok.
"We expected this type of violence to continue for a while because security officers have not been aggressive enough" in their pursuit of militants.
His officers in the army southern command quickly announced a 100,000 baht (2,600 dollar) reward for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrators.
The blast came just hours after the prime minister cut short a visit to the region during which he unveiled a highly controversial plan to block state funding for more than 350 "red zone" villages deemed to be prone to violence
and sympathetic to separatists.
Most of the red villages are in Narathiwat, the province where the blast occurred.
Thaksin said it was unlikely that foreign terrorist elements were behind the attack but admitted it was aimed at putting pressure on his administration.
"The perpetrators were the offspring of those (suspected separatist militants) with outstanding arrest warrants and their aim was to put pressure on the government," he said.
Narathiwat governor Pracha Taerat said the pickup was laden with about 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of explosives and was detonated outside the Marina Hotel in an area crowded with open-air beer bars.
Analysts said the scale of the explosion and the methods used by the assailants marked a new and heightened scale in the violence.
"If there was a first (car bomb), there will be a second and a third," Phuvadol Songprasert, a humanities lecturer at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, told AFP, adding that such a powerful explosion was not unexpected.
All the dead are believed to be Thai, though police said they had officially confirmed the identity of only two victims.
The area, a scene of devastation after the blast which left a small crater in the road and knocked out power, was cordoned off as forensic officers pored over the site Friday to collect evidence, police said.
Four cars, five motorcycles and a number of nearby shops, restaurants and bars were destroyed by the bomb, while the Marina Hotel, where a wedding party had gathered on the third floor at the time of the explosion, suffered
considerable damage.
Sungai Kolok, along the Malaysian border, has a thriving nightlife district routinely visited by scores of Thai and Malaysian tourists. It has been the scene of three other major blasts since last March.
Thaksin had not visited Sungai Kolok on his trip but he had spent time the previous day in several spots in Narathiwat, one of three provinces that have endured the brunt of the unrest. - AFP
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