Gunmen kill 4 in Thai tea shop shooting

Gunmen opened fire on a group of villagers at a tea shop in Thailand's Muslim south on Tuesday, killing four people and wounding 15 others, police said, the latest attack amid an upsurge of violence in the restive region bordering Malaysia. 

Four assailants dressed in camouflaged uniforms and riding in the back of a pickup truck shot into the crowded tea shop in Bannang Sata, Yala province before fleeing the scene. Police blamed the attack on separatist rebels. 

"They dressed like soldiers and we suspect that it was in an attempt to blame the attack on the authorities and add to distrust and anxieties," Yala province governor Krisada Boonraj told Reuters. 

The violence has killed more than 4,500 people, both Muslims and Buddhists, in the rubber-rich Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat provinces bordering Malaysia since a decades-old separatist rebellion against the Buddhist-dominated Thai state resurfaced in January 2004.  
The number of attacks has increased in recent months in what security analysts say could be an effort by a shadowy insurgents movement to counter government claims that its public relations and development campaigns were helping to contain the unrest. 

Local Muslims largely oppose the presence of tens of thousands of police, soldiers and state-armed Buddhist guards in the three southernmost provinces, a region that was part an independent Muslim sultanate known as Patani until annexed by Thailand a century ago. 

Rights groups and local people say many of the attacks on the region's Muslim majority are extrajudicial killings carried out by troops or Buddhist vigilantes. They dispute the official line that insurgents are killing Muslims working as informants for security forces. 

The government and military repeatedly dismiss those allegations as separatist propaganda.