A FAMILIAR pattern of bomb attacks left two soldiers dead and injured 17 others in the southernmost province of Yala yesterday, a day after a joint working group for peace talks failed to reach common ground in the restive South.

The violence began at 8.50am when police received a call reporting a roadside explosion in a village in Yala’s Kabang district. No one was hurt in the incident.

Forty minutes later, military rangers and Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) officers were travelling to the scene on the road between Yala and Kabang districts when another bomb hidden along the roadside went off in Yaha district, injuring two security personnel.

Security personnel then engaged in brief gunfire, although there were no confirmed reports of the assailants returning fire.

More soldiers were deployed to inspect the scene to look for the suspected militants when, at 10am, a third bomb went off in the area, this time injuring more than a dozen soldiers, two of whom later died in hospital.

Insurgents in the deep South have previously used the same tactic of detonating a bomb or attacking officers, and then setting off a follow-up bomb targeting security personnel responding to the original attack.

Authorities said yesterday they were familiar with the tactic and they had blocked mobile phone signals to prevent remote-controlled detonation of additional explosives when they are investigating the scene of an attack. However, as of press time yesterday, there was still no information on how the third bomb had been triggered.

The deep South has been rocked by renewed violence since 2004, with more than 6,800 people having been killed in the predominantly Muslim region, while authorities in Bangkok have struggled to contain the violence and restore peace.

Successive Thai governments in recent years have failed in several attempts to establish peace talks with insurgents, largely in part because no single specific group has claimed responsibility for the violence. Several groups have surfaced under different names to engage in dialogue with officials, but none of them have appeared to represent the militants on the ground. Current negotiations are proceeding with a group formed in 2015 under the name of MARA Patani, which claims to be an umbrella organisation of insurgents, but peace talks with authorities have not yielded any results so far.

A joint working group of MARA Patani and Thai government representatives held meetings in Malaysia between Monday and Wednesday, but they failed again to reach an agreement about setting up so-called “safety zones” in the deep South, a source said, citing different approaches.

The Thai government wanted to name specific locations as safety zones, while MARA Patani preferred to discuss the working procedures that would be applied in the zones, the source said.

Fourth Army Region commander Lt-General Piyawat Nakwanich admitted that talks this week had failed to reach common ground, but added that both sides would “never give up” and would continue their dialogue in the future.

Conflict observers interpreted the bombs yesterday as a message opposing the idea of safety zones, and a signal that insurgents on the ground did not recognise the MARA Patani leadership.

Meanwhile, Piyawat led a Thai delegation to meet his Malaysian counterpart, Lt-General Azizan bin MD Delin, in Penang yesterday for the 106th meeting of the Border Regional Committee to discuss security matters along the shared border.

Topics of discussion included joint patrols, disaster management, fighting narcotics trafficking, combating smuggling and, notably, dual-nationality citizens, who might be involved in insurgency activities.