The jihad is gathering force in southern Thailand, where another Buddhist was decapitated by local representatives of the RoP: Local official beheaded in southern Thailand by suspected Muslim militants, say police.

Suspected Muslim insurgents shot and then beheaded a local official in southern Thailand on Wednesday in an attack believed to be part of ongoing sectarian violence in the area, police said.

Surin Somchit, an employee of the community water authority, was shot and wounded by four bullets fired near his office in Narathiwat province’s Rangae district, police Capt. Songphol Juimanee said.

The as yet unknown number of attackers then cut off their victim’s head with a machete and dumped it by the roadside, he said.

According to witnesses, Surin was supervising more than 10 workers laying a water pipe in a rubber plantation, when two gunman arrived on motorcycle and shouted at them in Yawi — a dialect of Malay spoken mainly by local Muslims — to run for their lives before they opened fire.

“It seems that the attackers targeted him as a Buddhist, that’s why they shout in Yawi,” Songphol said. Buddhist Thais generally do not speak much Yawi.

Songphol said police suspect the attackers were Islamic insurgents who are seeking to separate the Muslim-dominated south from the rest of Thailand.

The insurgents launched a campaign of violence at the beginning of last year that has met with a sharp response from authorities and claimed more than 880 lives in Thailand’s three southernmost provinces, Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat.

The beheading was the sixth carried out this month and the second to take place in daylight hours. Only three other beheadings have taken place in the 18-month wave of violence, one in May last year in Narathiwat, and two others in November.

All of the victims who have been beheaded, including the one on Wednesday, were Buddhists, and Thai officials believe the attacks are an attempt to terrorize Buddhists in the south into leaving the area.

In another incident Wednesday, a gunman on the back of a motorcycle shot and killed a roadside vendor in another area of Narathiwat, police said. On Tuesday, suspected Islamic insurgents fatally shot four people.

Drive-by shootings and bombings have become near daily occurrences in the three southernmost provinces.