Here’s more information on the terrorist attack in south Thailand yesterday, targeting a popular tourist area: Six bombs shatter Thai tourist strip. (Hat tip: Doss.)

BANGKOK: At least one Australian has been injured after a string of bombs tore apart a popular tourist area in Thailand, killing four people and wounding dozens.

Six simultaneous bombs tore into revellers along the main bar strip in Hat Yai, southern Thailand’s largest city that serves as its tourist hub.

A Canadian tourist was among the dead, according to officials. A dead female mistakenly identified by medical staff as a Chinese tourist turned out later to be an ethnic minority from Chiang Mai, hospital officials said.

The bombings marked a significant escalation in the Islamic insurgency that has raged since 2004, with separatists appearing more willing now to kill civilians, analysts said. Health Minister Pinit Jarusombat said 14 other foreigners were among the 72 wounded, and included six Malaysians, three Singaporeans, three Britons, an Indian and an American.

Outside the Brown Sugar Bar and Cafe, an Australian visitor still wearing his hospital gown stood staring at the wreckage of where he was drinking the night before. “I feel really lucky today,” said the distraught man, who did not give his name, adding that doctors had removed shrapnel from his shoulder and that his girlfriend had suffered leg fractures.

The blasts came just weeks after a wave of bombings targeted 22 banks throughout the violence-plagued south, where more than 1400 people have been killed in daily attacks by suspected Islamic militants since January 2004. …

Experts blamed a complex web of Islamic groups whose roots go back to a decades-old separatist movement with ties to organised crime and corrupt local officials.

One bright spot, they say, is the lack of evidence connecting Thai separatists with global or regional terror groups such as al-Qa’ida or Jemaah Islamiah, which was behind the 2002 Bali bombings.

I guess the fact that the Thai Islamists use the same tactics and read the same holy book as Al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah doesn’t count as evidence of a connection.