Fears that 15 months of unrest is spreading from Thailand?s Muslim far south increased yesterday after an unprecedented triple bomb attack on an airport, hotel and supermarket just outside the violence-hit region. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said the almost simultaneous Sunday evening blasts, which security officials blamed on Islamic militants, had raised concern across the Buddhist country. ?This doesn?t only worry me. It worries the whole nation? Thaksin told reporters. The blasts killed two people and wounded 60, seven of them critically, health officials said.

Fears that militants might take their campaign to the capital Bangkok weakened the Thai currency, the baht, in early trade, dealers said. The blast in the departure lounge of Hat Yai international airport, 1,000 km (620 miles) south of Bangkok, in Songkhla province was the first bomb attack on a Thai airport, and comes two weeks before the Buddhist ?Water Festival? celebrations.

More than 600 people have died in the 15-month-old unrest in the three southernmost and mainly Muslim provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat, where militants waged a separatist campaign in the 1970s and 1980s. But until Sunday?s blasts the violence had rarely spread beyond these three provinces, where most people speak a Malay dialect and have greater emotional ties to neighbouring Malaysia.

Small bombs or shootings, normally targeting police or government officials, have become daily occurrences in the three southernmost provinces since violence erupted in January 2004. Thaksin vowed to keep up military pressure on perpetrators of the violence, but said the police and army would act within the law in keeping with last week?s policy U-turn to scale back military presence in the area. ?We will continue our intensive prevention and suppression measures, but we will not abandon our non-violent means,? he said before departing on a trip to the northern city of Chiang Mai.

Security at other airports in the region had been tightened, he said. Thailand?s predominantly Muslim far south has a century long history of often violent separatism, which security analysts fear might attract backing from international Islamic militant networks, such as Osama bin Laden?s al Qaeda group.

<B>Trirat Puttajanyawong</B>