Bomb kills four in Muslim southern Thailand

BANGKOK, May 28 (Reuters) A bomb planted on a motorcycle in a busy market in southern Thailand killed four people today, the army said, the latest victims of a Muslim separatist insurgency in which more than 2,100 people have now died. ''There are four dead and 23 injured, five of them seriously,'' army spokesman Acra Tiproch said. Two of the dead were children.

It is not known whether the victims were Buddhist or Muslim.

The blast, in the southern province of Songkhla which has avoided much of the daily violence, came less than a day after a string of seven small bombs in the provincial capital, Hat Yai, wounded 13 people.

Suspected Muslim separatists have hit towns in the far south, an independent sultanate until annexed by overwhelmingly Buddhist Thailand a century ago, with a series of small bombs designed to cause chaos rather than mass death.

The latest insurgency in the region, where 80 per cent of people are Muslim and speak a Malay dialect, erupted in January 2004.

REUTERS SW VV1630