Thailand: Southern terrorists could have received training from JI

Southern insurgents have embraced transceiver technology in their bomb attacks, a technique found to be common in the Iraq war.

Radio transceivers are known to have triggered recent bombings in the far South. They make for a more efficient trigger device than mobile phones because authorities cannot interfere with the signals.

A bomb attack in Yala’s Yaha district on July 17, which killed two soldiers and wounded five people, is believed to have been detonated by a transceiver, said Khunying Porntip Rojanasunan, director of the Central Institute of Forensic Science.

The insurgents have also produced home-made grenades which they hurl into crowds.

One bizarre device they have invented is a fake boundary marker stuffed with explosives which mostly targets authorities on patrol duty.

Khunying Porntip said the militants usually destroy the real markers and replace them with fakes. The bomb inside is triggered by a mobile phone or is wired to a timer.

She said authorities should coordinate intelligence information and keep abreast of new forms of attacks.

Col Tawisak Jantrasin, head of the army’s explosive ordnance disposal unit, said the use of transceivers to launch attacks was not new. It has been absent from the attack scenes for a long time. But the Yaha assault confirmed the device had made a comeback and this time the transceiver-detonated explosion had been a lot harder to foil.

via Bangkok Post : JI bomb-maker linked to southern militants.

Jemaah Islamiyah seems to have spread throughout all South-Eastern Asia: Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia have been discovering lately that the organization or its offshot, Noordin’s Tanzim aidat al-Jihad, were actually present and active in their soil. Now Thailand’s “separatists” may have also received JI’s training.