YALA, Thailand, Aug 22 (Reuters) - Three civil servants were killed in a gun and bomb attack and a Muslim rubber tapper shot dead by suspected insurgents in Thailand's deep south on Saturday, police said. The attacks took place in Yala and Narathiwat, two of three mainly Muslim provinces near the Malaysian border where close to 3,500 people have died in violence since 2004. Suspected Muslim rebels detonated a roadside bomb as a vehicle drove along a road in Yala, killing three of the civil servants. The survivors returned fire and four were wounded in the 15-minute gunfight that followed, police said. In Narathiwat, a Muslim rubber tapper was shot dead by unknown gunmen in a pickup truck as he travelled to work. The violence took the total number of people killed to 10 in the last five days in the deep south, where separatists fighting the Thai state regularly target government officials and employees of the region's vital rubber industry. The three southernmost provinces contribute about 10 percent of the rubber output of Thailand, the world's biggest exporter. The region was once a Malay Muslim sultanate until annexed by Buddhist Thailand a century ago, and separatist tensions have simmered ever since. (Reporting by Surapan Boonthanom; Writing by Kittipong Soonprasert; Editing by Martin Petty and Jerry Norton)
A general view shows a crater and Iraq's damaged Foreign Ministry building after a bomb attack in Baghdad, August 20, 2009. A series of blasts in Baghdad killed 95 people and ...
