Another Teacher Murdered by Islamists in Thailand

The religion of peace strikes again. Of course, it's down in the restive south.

Suspected separatist insurgents shot and killed a Buddhist teacher on Tuesday in Thailand's restive Muslim far south, police said.

Somchoke Chitkongsat, 59, a teacher at a government-run secondary school was shot while waiting for a bus to school in Yala provincial township, said police Lt. Veerakij Kaewnuanjing.

Somchoke teaches in nearby Pattani province but lived in Yala, which is 780 kilometers (480 miles) south of Bangkok, and traveled by bus to work everyday.

"Police believe that the insurgents knew that he waited for the bus at that point every morning, and shot him today," Veerakij said.

Witnesses told police that the gunman arrived on the back of motorcycle and shot Somchoke at close range, then sped away, Veerakij said.

More than 2,400 people have been killed in Thailand's Muslim-majority southernmost provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat, and the southern part of nearby Songkhla, since a long-simmering Islamic separatist insurgency flared up in January 2004

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