NARATHIWAT (Thailand) - ONE person was killed and 70 injured on Tuesday when twin bombs ripped through a market and tea shop near a government office in Thailand's insurgency-hit south, police and army said.

Officials said the attack was one of the biggest assaults on civilians during the bloody separatist rebellion that has been raging for nearly five years in the three southern Muslim-majority provinces.

'It is the biggest attack so far in terms of number of injuries as there were 71 people wounded,' southern military spokesman Colonel Parinya Chaidilok told AFP. Five were in a serious condition, he said.

Lieutenant General Surachai Suebsuk, Narathiwat police commander, said that one of the people seriously injured - a woman named Amporn Pui who was an elected community representative - died later in hospital.

A car bomb exploded just before midday Tuesday at a fruit market opposite a district office where village heads were meeting in Narathiwat province, Mr Surachai said, and moments later another blast hit at a tea shop.

Mr Surachai had earlier said that three blasts hit in Sukhirin district close to the Malaysian border, but investigations later in the day showed that in fact there were two bombs, he told AFP.

Thai television reported that one of the blasts was caused by a bomb hidden in a motorcycle, and showed images of charred and overturned cars at the scene.

'Like every attack, no one or no group has claimed responsibility,' said Mr Parinya, but added that the attack was connected to the insurgency.

In separate incidents in the restive region, a 47-year-old religious teacher was shot dead in Narathiwat province on Monday night, while a 41-year-old man was killed later in a similar attack in nearby Pattani province, police said.

Tuesday's explosions come a week after Thai Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat visited the Muslim-majority far south and told reporters that the five-year-long insurgency appeared to have eased.

More than 3,400 people have been killed in rebel attacks by shadowy insurgent groups operating in the region since January 2004 and successive governments have struggled to quell the unrest.

There are small bomb attacks almost every week in the south, but they usually target police and soldiers and only injure a handful of people.

In the last major bomb attack, four people were killed and 49 injured in February 2007 in Yala when a series of coordinated explosions ripped through the province.

The three far southern provinces were an ethnic Malay sultanate until mainly Buddhist Thailand annexed the region in 1902, provoking decades of tensions.

Mr Somchai said in his first policy statement in October that his new government was committed to tackling the ongoing insurgency by reaching out to the different communities and promoting economic development.

Independent monitoring group Deep South Watch reported 18 deaths in the south during the first two weeks of October and said this was the lowest number of fatalities in that time period in four years.

But a day after Mr Somchai's October 28 visit to Pattani and Narathiwat, a bomb blast wounded nine people including three soldiers in nearby Yala province. -- AFP