Militants burned the home of a Buddhist family and opened fire on neighbours in Thailand?s restive Muslim south yesterday, killing two people and wounding two, police said. At least two gunmen set fire to the wooden house in a mainly Muslim rubber plantation village in Pattani, one of the three provinces hit by a two-year separatist insurgency in which more than 1,100 people have been killed, police said. ?One died in the flames and the other was killed in the shooting,? Police Colonel Suthon Disayabutr told Reuters by telephone.

The government has tried many means to end the violence and win hearts and minds of the 1.8 million people in the region bordering Malaysia from using brute force to bombing the region with millions of paper ?peace? birds by Air Force warplanes. But daily gun and bomb attacks in the largely Muslim, ethnic Malay south continue.