Gunmen killed three Muslim schoolboys and three Buddhist villagers in separate attacks in Thailand?s rebellious Muslim south, officials said yesterday. The boys were shot dead late on Saturday at an Islamic boarding school in Saba Yoi in southern Songkhla province, near the Malaysian border, a police officer told Reuters.

Police said separatist militants carried out the attack but angry villagers blamed it on Thai army rangers, saying they did not believe Muslims could have been responsible.

Hundreds of protesters blockaded the school, closed roads and prevented officials from inspecting the scene. ?The militants are trying to make villagers believe the gunmen are from the security forces,? the police officer said.

Yesterday, attackers shot dead a man and two women, all Buddhists, in another part of Saba Yoi. The man, a rubber tapper, and a mother and daughter, taking a break from work at a charcoal furnace, were killed by gunmen on motorcycles, police said.

Saba Yoi is one of several Songkhla districts into which violence has spilled from the three southernmost provinces hit by a three-year separatist insurgency.

No signs of abating

Rebels have targeted government offices, schools and businesses in attacks that have killed more than 2,000 people, many of them Muslims.

Songkhla governor Sonthi Thechanand said officials were trying to negotiate access to the school, but villagers said they first wanted to bury the dead, two boys aged 17 and one 14. Seven other students were wounded in the shooting.

The insurgency in the provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat ? an Islamic sultanate until annexed by Bangkok a century ago ? has shown no signs of abating since a Sept. 19 coup led by a Muslim general.

On Thursday authorities imposed a curfew on the Yala districts of Bannangsta and Yaha where suspected militants killed eight people in an ambush on a civilian minibus on Wednesday.

The minibus attack infuriated Buddhists, a minority in the far south, where Muslims who speak a Malay dialect have long complained about being treated as second-class citizens.

A military crackdown would be popular among Thailand?s overwhelming Buddhist majority, even though the government installed after a bloodless coup in September says it is pursuing a policy of reconciliation to restore peace.