Militants gun down three teachers in Thailand

Bangkok, June 11: Suspected Islamic militants shot dead three elementary school teachers, including two women, in separate incidents in Thailand's southern Narathiwat province this afternoon.

According to police in Narathiwat bordering Malaysia, eyewitnesses saw two armed men walk into the teachers' room of an elementary school and fire several times at the two women who were having lunch.

In another incident in the same province, a male elementary school teacher was gunned down while he was driving home for lunch today.

All the three victims were Buddhists teaching in government schools in the province where school teachers and schools have been targeted by armed separatists. The separatists have unleashed a reign of terror in Thailand's three Muslim-majority southern border provinces of Narthiwat, Yala and Pattani.

More than 2,200 people in the region have been killed in the separatist violence since early January 2004. The insurgents, who are increasingly copying tactics of West Asia Islamic terrorists, are campaigning for a separate homeland in the ethnically, linguistically and religiously different region.

The government schools are being targeted by the militants who allege that the state is using the education system to spread Thailand's majority Buddhist way of life in the region.

UNI