UPDATE 1-Gunmen kill 15 in southern Thailand’s worst attack in years

Suspected separatist insurgents stormed a security checkpoint in Thailand’s Muslim-majority south and killed at least 15 people, including a police officer and many village defence volunteers, security officials said on Wednesday. A decade-old separatist insurgency in predominantly Buddhist Thailand’s largely ethnic Malay-Muslim provinces of Yala, Pattani, and Narathiwat has killed nearly 7,000 people since 2004, says Deep South Watch, a group that monitors the violence. The population of the provinces, which belonged to an independent Malay Muslim sultanate before Thailand annexed them in 1909, is 80 percent Muslim, while the rest of the country is overwhelmingly Buddhist.

Source: yahoo.com/news