Women and children aid the Thai jihad, in effect taunting the Thai military for its reluctance to inflict civilian casualties. From AsiaTimes, with thanks to Romy:
BANGKOK – Suspected Islamist insurgents avoided capture after torturing to death two Thai marines by beating and stabbing the bound-and-gagged victims behind a human shield of defiant Muslim women and children, horrifying the government and plunging southern Thailand into a fresh security crisis.
Amid the world’s most violent Islamist insurgency outside Iraq, angry and confused security forces hunted the elusive killers, described as three or four young men who ran away, leaving the marines’ bloodied bodies in Tanyong Limo village.
“They were brutally beaten to death with machetes and sticks, while their hands and legs were tied up, and they were gagged and blindfolded,” Lieutenant General Kwanchart Klaharn, commander of the Fourth Army and director of the Southern Border Provinces Peace-building Command, told reporters.
The bodies were locked inside a building near a mosque, prompting security forces to break down a door to gain access before transporting them to a hospital morgue, he said.