Bomb Kills 3 Soldiers, Wounds One In Thai South

A roadside bomb killed three soldiers and wounded one seriously in Thailand's Muslim-majority far south on Saturday.

A roadside bomb killed three soldiers and wounded one seriously in Thailand's Muslim-majority far south on Saturday, a day after Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont visited the region, police said.

One soldier was killed instantly and two died later in hospital. Another soldier was being treated for serious head wounds, a hospital official said.

The soldiers were in a Humvee on patrol in Pattani, one of three provinces in the Muslim deep south, when the buried pipe bomb exploded as they drove past, police said.

It was the latest attack by shadowy insurgents in the Muslim-majority region along the Malaysian border, where more than 2,000 people have died in three years of separatist unrest.

No one has claimed responsibility for the violence in the region, a former sultanate annexed by overwhelmingly Buddhist Thailand a century ago.

On a tour of the deep south on Friday, Surayud said he supported a move to offer some sort of amnesty to the insurgents, but details of the idea floated by local army commanders were unclear.

"We should give it careful consideration and that is what the government is doing," he told reporters.

Surayud has vowed not to reverse a softly-softly approach to resolving the insurgency despite growing calls on the government to take tougher action against the militants after the savage murder of a Buddhist woman earlier this month.

"We will seek to establish peaceful dialogue with good people and deal with the bad people through the legal process. We will not resort to measures outside the law in tackling this problem," Surayud said.