Prisoners crushed to death after Thai riots

AT least 78 people were suffocated or crushed to death after being arrested and packed into police trucks following a riot in southern Thailand, doctors said yesterday.

The announcement increased the death toll from the latest eruption of violence in Thailand’s Muslim-dominated south to 84.

Officials had earlier said that six people were shot to death during yesterday’s clashes at a police station in Narathiwat province.

Dr Pornthip Rojanasunan, a forensics expert who works for the Justice Ministry, said that she and a team of doctors conducted autopsies on 78 bodies at an army camp and found that most had suffocated.

The dead were among some 1,300 people that military officials said they had arrested following the police station riot.

Major General Sinchai Nujsathit, deputy commander of the fourth army, said the victims may have died from suffocation “because we had more than 1,300 people packed into the six-wheel trucks”.

Manit Suthaporn, deputy permanent secretary of the Justice Ministry, said the victims probably suffocated because they were piled on top of each other.

The violence erupted when about 2,000 Muslim youths demonstrated outside the police station in Takbai district, demanding the release of six men.

Police and military forces tried to disperse the crowd with gunshots, water cannons and tear gas. Six people were killed and several injured in the melee.

More than 400 people have been killed in southern Thailand since January. Most have died in small bomb attacks and drive-by shootings directed at police and government officials. Authorities blame the violence on a renewed Islamic separatist insurgency.

Violence has troubled overwhelmingly Buddhist Thailand’s three Muslim-majority provinces for decades, although it has worsened this year. Residents claim they are discriminated against by the central government.