BANGKOK/JEDDAH, 29 October 2004 — A bomb ripped through two bars in southern Thailand yesterday, killing two people and wounding about 20, in what could be the first reaction to the deaths of 78 Muslims in police custody this week.

The blast came as pressure grew on Thailand to accept an independent investigation into the deaths of the people who suffocated in police custody, and for Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to apologize to the Muslim world.

Thaksin had claimed that the Muslims died because fasting during Ramadan had weakened them. He also accused some of the victims of being “weak because they used drugs.”

A spokesman for the Islamic Society of Thailand described Thaksin’s claim as “outrageous”, and asked for “an unreserved apology.”

Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, said it was saddened by the deaths and worried about rising tension. “Indonesia is confident that the government of Thailand would conduct appropriate inquiries to shed light about the tragic accident,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

Protests at the massacre also came from Malaysia and Turkey while the United States said it held the Thai authorities responsible for the tragedy.

“We hope that the Thai government will deal with the situation in a way that does not exacerbate tensions,” State Department spokeswoman Susan Pittman said in Washington.

“Thai authorities are responsible for the humane treatment of prisoners and we urge that their current investigation fully examine the circumstances of these deaths,” Pittman said.

In Malaysia several Islamic associations called on the government to ask Thailand for information about circumstances under which the massacre took place.

“This tragedy will create more instability and dissatisfaction and we are very worried that people will rise against the government,” Mohammad Hatta, a top official in the main Islamic party in Malaysia, said.

In yesterday’s blast, a Malaysian man and a Thai woman were killed in the border town of Sungai Kolok in Narathiwat.

In Monday’s tragedy, protesters suffocated as they were crammed into overcrowded trucks and taken to military barracks in Thailand’s volatile south bringing the total death toll after a protest outside a police station on Monday to 85.

One survivor of the “massacre” told reporters from his hospital bed in the town of Pattani that troops piled them up in the trucks “like bricks”.

“Everyone had to lie down in the back. We were lying one on top of another with no space to breathe,” said the rubber-tapper, who said he was also kicked and hit several times in the back of the head with a rifle butt.

“I thought I was going to die. Luckily, I’m still alive. I was in the middle of the truck, where I could catch some air,” said the man, who is in his 30s.

Bruises were visible on his shins and both cheeks and his right arm was swollen to almost twice its normal size.

Maudin Awae, 20, who said he was in the second of five layers of bodies in another truck, told of similar horrors.

“A lot of people cried for help. They asked to stand up but the soldiers did not let us. They stamped on us,” Maudin said, adding that at least 10 people in his truck died.

It was the worst violence in the mainly Muslim tip of the otherwise Buddhist kingdom since April 28, when troops and police shot dead 106 Muslim militants.

More than 440 people have now been killed in 10 months of violence that looks increasingly like a Muslim separatist insurgency in Thailand’s three southernmost provinces.

Thaksin, who has adopted a hard-line stance to the southern unrest, said security forces used “gentle measures” to quell Monday’s protest outside a police station that ended when troops and police fired live ammunition, tear gas and water cannon.

Six men were killed at the scene of the protest, called to demand the release of six Muslim villagers accused of giving government-issue shotguns to militants. Another man died in hospital on Tuesday.

The Pattani United Liberation Organization (PULO), a separatist group largely dormant since the 1980s, said insurgents would take their fight to Bangkok. The heightened security fears led to a 3.4 percent fall on Thailand’s stock market.

“Their capital will be burned down in the same way the Pattani capital has been burned,” PULO said in an Internet statement. “Their blood will be shed on the soil and flow into water. Our weapon is fire and oil, fire and oil, fire and oil.”

The group, which is not thought to have an active militant arm, was involved in a violent campaign in the 1970s and 1980s for an independent Muslim kingdom of Pattani between southern Thailand and northern Malaysia.

Thai Muslim leaders said the massacre would inflame the unrest, and could transform the relatively impoverished region into a fertile recruiting ground for extremists.

The Asian Human Rights Commission called for an independent inquiry into the protest and its aftermath.