By CS Thana
BANGKOK
A police officer has been shot dead by suspected insurgents in Thailand’s Muslim majority south, officials confirmed Tuesday.
An officer of Narathiwat province’s central police told Anadolu Agency on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to media that Sergeant Manop Chaichana had been escorting teachers from a local school to their housing Monday evening.
Their convoy was ambushed by suspected insurgents who shot Chaichana, who managed to return fire but was pronounced dead before reaching a local hospital.
The officer said Buddhist teachers and state schools in the region require police protection and are regularly targeted by Muslim separatists, the officer added.
Police say they are still investigating the fatal incident but are understaffed and ill equipped.
Narathiwat is among three Muslim majority southernmost provinces in predominantly Buddhist Thailand that have been embroiled in a bloody insurgency that has left more than 6,200 dead and around 11,000 injured since 2004.
The provinces -- including Pattani and Yala -- constituted an independent Islamic sultanate with great religious influence in the Southeast Asian Muslim world until it was incorporated into Siam after a 1909 Anglo-Siamese agreement.
Great Britain was then the colonial power in Malaysia and was exerting a degree of control over the region.
From 1938, a virulently nationalistic campaign organized by Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram government tried to impose Thai cultural norms onto the Malay Muslims, who reacted by asking for some degree of political and cultural autonomy.
Things turned for the worse in the 1960s, when the military dictator Field Marshal Tarit Sanarat attempted to control the Islamic boarding schools, locally known as pondoks. Several Muslim groups then took up arms and waged a guerrilla war against the Thai state.
The insurgency petered out towards the end of the 1980s but was renewed in January 2004 when a wave of attacks against the military, police and Buddhist monks rocked the region.
