Non-Subscriber Extract
Explosive evolution - Thai bomb-makers adapt
By Anthony Davis
10 September 2009
Thai soldiers and forensic experts examine a crater created by a bomb attack on a pick-up truck carrying soldiers in Yala province, southern Thailand, on 27 June 2006. Achieving a direct hit beneath a vehicle moving at speed is not easy, but the effect of such an explosion is both dramatic and lethal. (PA)
In the late morning of 17 July 2009, a large vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED) concealed in a parked Ford Ranger pick-up truck exploded in the district centre of Yaha in Thailand's southern border province of Yala. Composed of an ammonium nitrate-fuel oil (ANFO) mix packed into two cooking gas tanks, the device disintegrated the pick-up and shredded its target, a passing Royal Thai Army (RTA) jeep, killing two soldiers including the deputy commander of the local task force, and wounding four troops and a passing civilian.
The foremost concern raised by the attack was neither the seniority of the officer killed nor the growing use of VBIEDs by the region's Malay-Muslim insurgents, but rather the technique used to trigger the device. For the first time in the long-running separatist conflict, militants detonated a device using a commercial radio transceiver, successfully circumventing jamming technology used to block mobile telephone and other remote signals.