3 children killed in Thai school attack

A deadly attack on an Islamic school in Thailand's restive south that left three students dead and seven injured sparked hundreds of Muslim villagers to rioted Sunday in protest.

Police blamed the attack in the southern province of Songkhla on Muslim insurgents, but villagers said they didn't believe Muslims were behind the violence.

More than 500 protesters gathered outside the school, parading the dead children's bodies through the crowd and setting fire to two buildings at a nearby government-owned school. Some hurled stones at police.

The attack occurred late Saturday evening at the Bamrungsart Pondok school, a Muslim boarding school in Songkhla province, said police Col. Thammasak Wasaksiri.

Attackers hurled explosives onto the school grounds and opened fire with assault rifles into the sleeping quarters of the school, Thammasak said.

He said police believe Muslim insurgents staged the attack and hoped to convince local residents that authorities were behind it — a ploy to win villagers over to the insurgents' cause.

But the protesting villagers said Sunday morning they didn't believe that Muslims had staged the attack.

"The villagers are accusing paratroopers of attacking the school," Thammasak said.

Thailand's three Muslim provinces have hundreds of religious Islamic schools, some of which authorities have accused of harboring insurgents and serving as a training ground for violence.

Drive-by shootings and bombings occur almost daily in Thailand's three Muslim-majority provinces — Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani, and increasingly in the neighboring province of Songkhla.

Gen. Virote Baucharoon, the army commander in charge of the restive provinces, said that security forces had recently raided an Islamic school and confiscated an M-16 assault rifle, bullets, a computer with suspicious material on the hard drive and other documents believed to be linked to the insurgency.

"This leads us to believe that religious schools are involved with the ongoing violence," he said.

Though Buddhist teachers have been targeted in the past, children have largely been spared.

The victims of Saturday's violence were identified as a 12-year-old and two 14-year-olds. Injured students, ranging in age from 13 to 17, were being treated for gun wounds and other injuries, Thammasak said. More than 75 students were in the school's dormitory at the time of the attack.

Violence in the south has increased since a military-installed government took power in September following a coup that ousted then-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

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