A powerful car bomb ripped through a restaurant packed with government officials in Thailand's troubled Muslim-majority south Tuesday, wounding at least 42 people, the army said. The blast was one of the most serious for months in the kingdom's insurgency-plagued provinces bordering Malaysia where a bloody separatist rebellion has been raging for more than five years.The 50-kilogramme (110-pound) device was hidden inside a stolen Toyota pick-up truck and exploded during the busy lunch hour in the centre of Narathiwat, the main town in the province of the same name, officials said.
"It's very horrible. We had intelligence that militants would mount a large-scale attack," Lieutenant General Pichet Wisaichorn, the southern region army commander, told reporters. He said that seven of the 42 people injured in the blast were in a critical condition. Most of the wounded were Buddhist government officials, who are often targeted by the Islamist militants in the region. Police and rescue workers were rushing the wounded to hospital and the local government chief was among those injured, a policeman said on condition of anonymity.
The timing of the attack just after the start of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan was "very interesting", said Sunai Phasuk, an analyst for Human Rights Watch in Thailand. "We are in the holy month of Ramadan and the bomb went off clearly to harm the non-Muslim population," he told AFP.