YALA - SUSPECTED separatist militants shot dead three people in Thailand's troubled Muslim-majority south, while a bomb blast wounded five soldiers, police said on Wednesday.

Police said a 40-year-old Buddhist man was killed in a drive-by shooting while shopping at a grocery store in Pattani province on Tuesday.

Gunmen later on Tuesday shot dead two 17-year-old Muslim boys riding a motorbike in Narathiwat province, they said, blaming the violence on fighting between separatist groups.

Five soldiers were injured, two of them seriously, in a bomb blast late on Tuesday in Yala, the capital town of the province of the same name, police added.

More than 3,700 people have been killed in a five-year insurgency in the southern provinces of Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani, with a sudden spike in violence in recent weeks.

Rebels have targeted both Buddhists and Muslims, with victims ranging from security forces to civilians such as teachers and rubber plantation workers.

The region was an autonomous Malay Muslim sultanate until predominantly Buddhist Thailand annexed it in 1902, provoking decades of tension. -- AFP