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YALA, THAILAND - A 46-YEAR-OLD Buddhist man was shot and then set ablaze as he tried to escape an attack by suspected Islamic separatists on Tuesday in Thailand's Muslim-majority south, police said.
Netr Noh-uma, a highway department official, was shot as he was riding a motorcycle with a colleague in Pattani, one of three provinces along the Malaysian border hit by four years of separatist unrest, police said.
A 34-year-old man was riding the motorcycle with him. He was also shot but managed to run away, police said.
Netr was too seriously wounded to escape. Police said that when he fell off the motorcycle, two militants doused him with petrol and set him on fire.
'They burned him alive after he was shot and fell from his motorbike. They were carrying the gasoline with them, they had planned to do this,' police Lieutenant Colonel Somkiat Karnchanaporn said.
In the nearby province of Yala, an 18-year-old woman was injured when she fell off her motorcycle as a roadside bomb exploded nearby.
Police said the explosion was likely aimed at a nearby convoy of soldiers, but missed its target.
More than 2,900 people have been killed since separatist unrest erupted in January 2004 in the south, which was an autonomous Malay Muslim sultanate until mainly Buddhist Thailand annexed it in 1902, provoking decades of tension. -- AFP
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