YALA, THAILAND - Five people were killed Friday in Thailand's far south, as Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva met with top brass to discuss security measures in the restive region.

Police said the five men - two army rangers, two school guards and a local politician - died in four separate attacks.

A 52-year-old Muslim man who ran the local administrative body in Pattani provincial town was killed by suspected separatist militants in a drive-by shooting at dawn.

Three hours later two school guards - one 41-year-old Buddhist and one Muslim - were killed in separate drive-by shootings in a nearby district.

Just before midday, two army rangers on foot patrol in the same district died instantly in a roadside bomb blast that wounded two others.

The new attacks came amid a flare-up in the insurgency that has wracked the Muslim-majority area on the Malaysian border for more than five years and claimed more than 3,700 lives.

Abhisit was due to meet with top defence staff on Friday afternoon in Bangkok to discuss the government's strategy for dealing with the separatist violence.

On Thursday the prime minister defended his government's handling of the situation in the south since he took power in December.

He admitted that the government had been warned of possible attacks on teachers after the recent start of the new term.

Schools and teachers are frequent targets of attacks in the south because militants see the education system as an effort by Bangkok to impose Buddhist Thai culture on the mainly ethnic Malay region.

The insurgency in southern Thailand erupted in January 2004. Buddhist-majority Thailand annexed the former ethnic Malay sultanate in 1902, leading to decades of tension.