Thailand: More beheadings in troubled Muslim south

[Turborama]

Source: Adnkronos International

Narathiwat, 26 Feb. (AKI) - Suspected Islamist rebels have decapitated three people in Thailand's Muslim dominated south in the past week, police said on Thursday.

Three people were killed late on Wednesday in the southern Thai province of Narathiwat, and one of the victims was decapitated, police said.

Forty-seven people, often soldiers, have been beheaded in Thailand's three Muslim-majority provinces of Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani since 2004. An estimated 3,300 people have been killed in the conflict.

Experts say the region's Islamic schools or 'pondok' are fomenting the Islamist rebellion.

Demands by Thai Muslims include the introduction of Islamic law and making ethnic Pattani Malay (Yawi) a working language in the region. They also want an improvement in the local economy and education system.

Read more: http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Religion/?id=3.0.3056365489

---

Yeah, OK, I think I'll put my plans of going to the south of Thailand on hold for a while...

[dcindian]

1. Sounds a little safer there then the christian nation of mexico

Where they had over 200 beheading last year. Of course you would never see this headline.


Mexico: More beheadings in troubled Christian Nation.

[Turborama]

2. Seriously?

Over 200 beheadings? Got a link to that?

I only ask out of sheer disbelief, not cynicism..

[Lasher]

3. Behind Mexico's Wave of Beheadings

Monday, Sep. 08, 2008

There's a peaceful aura about the lifeless faces lined up on the video, death having drained the tension from their cheeks, their eyes wide shut above thick mustaches and square jaws. But as the shot pans out, the horror of their end is revealed: The dead men's heads have been roughly hacked away from their torsos, which the camera finds hanging upside down across the room on meat hooks, their blood draining away onto white floor tiles. "This is your responsibility for not respecting the deals you have made with us," reads a handwritten note in Spanish by the decapitated heads.

The sickening footage was posted on YouTube after 12 headless bodies were dumped onto two ranches in Mexico's southeastern Yucatan peninsula last week. Police identified the victims as local drug dealers, saying five were decapitated while alive but that the rest had been dismembered after first being strangled or beaten to death. A police sweep netted three suspects allegedly arrested while carrying bloodied axes and machetes. The suspects were alleged to have been members of the ultra-violent drug gang the Zetas, indicating the atrocities may have been the latest act of terror in the relentless turf war over Mexico's billion-dollar smuggling routes. Police also claimed the killings may have had a ritual dimension, after searching the suspects' houses and finding shrines to "The Holy Death," a Grim Reaper figure venerated by many Mexican criminals.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1839576,00.html

[Lost in CT]

6. Apples and hand Grenades... but you know that. nt

[alofarabia]

4. Surely there must be a distinction between beheading of

a) competitor drug dealers by other drug dealers

and

b) people who are Christians, or Muslims who don't adhere to your version of Islam

The fact that the people beheaded in Mexico are likely Christian is irrelevent to why they were beheaded

[niceypoo]

5. I spent weeks in Southern Thailand last summer

And I felt about a hundred times safer than I have ever felt in Mexico. Every muslim I met, and I met them everywhere I went, was gushingly polite and peaceful like most Thai's.