South Thailand Bomb Attack Kills Police Officer

One police officer was killed and another injured in a bomb attack in Thailand's southern Songkhla Province, local media said Tuesday.

An improvised explosive device planted by South Thailand's Islamist separatists was detonated at a railroad station in the province's Chana District, the Channel 3 television station reported.

The bomb had been planted in a motorcycle parked at the station before being remotely detonated, according to the broadcaster.

The Songkhla Province borders on Thailand's Yala and Pattani provinces, both majority-Malay and predominantly Muslim. The two provinces, as well as the Narathiwat province located even further south, have seen a low-level insurgency since the 1940s, but violence escalated in the early 2000s, claiming thousands of lives in 12 years of fighting.

The area, formerly a semi-independent Sultanate of Pattani that acted as a buffer zone between the British Malaya and the Kingdom of Siam, was incorporated into the latter as a result of the  Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909.