Thai protesters die in custody

At least 78 people died in southern Thailand after being arrested and loaded into army trucks following Monday's clashes with security forces. Officials said almost all the dead suffocated as they were taken to an army barracks several hours away. The new death toll is in addition to six people who died during the clashes themselves, which erupted on Monday following the arrest of six Muslim men. After clashing with security forces, more than 1,000 protesters are reported to have been arrested. "We brought people into detention and found that another 78 people were dead," Justice Ministry spokesman Manit Suthaporn told reporters.

The violence began on Monday after a crowd gathered at the district police station to protest against the detention of six men accused of providing weapons to Islamic militants. Police said they fired water cannon and tear gas to disperse the crowd. Southern police chief told Bangkok radio earlier that protesters were being questioned to find out who persuaded them to gather and how they were mobilised. He said that many of the demonstrators were armed and appeared to have taken drugs.

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who flew to the south after the clashes, has praised the security force's response."They have done a great job," he told reporters, before the higher death toll was announced. "They really set out to cause trouble so we had to take drastic action against them," he said. Neighbouring Malaysia, on the border with southern Thailand, expressed concern. "We hope the government of Thailand will be able to manage this crisis so that it will not spread and inflame further violence," Prime Minister Badawi told reporters. It was the latest in an upsurge of violence in the Muslim-majority south. Muslim separatists fought a low-key insurgency in the region in the 1970s and 80s.

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T I M E E U R O P E , 15 . 12 . 04 .

Athens bus hijackers demand $1m

Two gunmen suspected to be Albanians have hijacked a Greek bus with 24 passengers today and demanded a $1 million ransom and a plane to fly them to Russia.

The bus was seized along a highway from the Athens suburb of Marathon. Nearly 12 hours after the early morning drama started, the hijackers have released 12 of their hostages in several batches throughout the day leaving 12 still captive. First police reports had said there were 26 hostages on board the bus. The hostage-takers spoke Greek with foreign accents.

Hundreds of police officers, snipers in camouflage attire and special forces took up positions around the

vehicle. The first freed hostage was released about five hours after the hijack at 6am. The hostage said the gunmen had explosives. After a visit to the hijack scene by Albania's ambassador and telephone talks between the law and order ministers of Greece and Albania, a senior police official told Reuters authorities believed the gunmen were Albanians and ruled out suggestions they might be Russians. "Unless we see their passports we can't be 100 per cent certain, but we are operating now on the belief they are from Albania," the official said. Hundreds of thousands of Albanians live in Greece. Many came from the neighbouring country to help with construction work for the Athens Olympics. As the standoff gripped the nation, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis postponed his departure for a European Union summit in Brussels by one day until Thursday.

The original driver, a ticket collector and a woman passenger managed to escape from the bus in the first seconds of the hijack. There have been no reports of injuries, but live television showed one gunman approaching the front of the bus and firing off two warning shots. The curtains in the bus windows were closed, blocking views inside, and a police helicopter hovered above. Television pictures had earlier shown one man carrying a rifle and standing inside the bus near the front seats. This is the first such incident since a November 2000 hijack of a bus carrying 35 Japanese tourists who were taken hostage by a man who surrendered to a TV talk show host after a nine-hour standoff. Two hijackings by Albanians in 1999 ended with the two hostage-takers being killed by police.

PRIVATE EYE (a satirical journal), 05 . 02 . 04 .