Bomb kills 1, wounds 23 in restive Thai south

Suspected Muslim insurgents detonated a bomb on Monday killing a paramilitary ranger and wounding 23 people in Thailand''s restive south, police said, the latest attack in the Muslim-dominated region bordering Malaysia.

A bomb hidden in a parked car exploded in a business district of Yala city, about 100 metres (110 yards) from a food market at 8.10am, killing the ranger instantly. Four rangers were wounded.

Nineteen civilians, most of them Buddhists, were also wounded, police said.

Yala is one of the three Muslim-dominated provinces bordering Malaysia where more than 4,500 people, both Muslims and Buddhists, have been killed in a low-level insurgency since 2004.

Analysts believe the unrest, for which no group has claimed responsibility, is an ethno-nationalist campaign by ethnic Malay Muslims who say their identity, language and culture is neither respected nor fully understood by the Buddhist-dominated Thai state.

Despite the deployment of 60,000 members of the security forces and police in the rubber-rich region, authorities have made little progress in ending the revolt.