Kin of Dead Detainees Seek Corpses at Thai Base

Hundreds of sobbing relatives besieged a Thai army base Wednesday to retrieve bodies or get information after 78 Muslim detainees died, most of them crammed inside army trucks where they suffocated.

Outside the base gates, some anxious relatives pored over lists of more than 1,000 Muslim men taken into custody after Monday’s clashes outside a police station about 60 miles away in Narathiwat province. Others wept as trucks rolled into the camp to retrieve bodies wrapped in plastic bags.

“I am looking for my brother,” said one distraught woman, waiting with her mother outside. “I don’t believe he is a militant. He is a construction worker.”

She did not know whether her brother was alive.

Twenty-two bodies remained unidentified and unclaimed, officials said.

In Bangkok, the capital, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said he was confident that the interrogation of the protesters would “help us piece together the situation.”

Thaksin expressed regret for this week’s deaths, saying that “there were some mistakes” in the handling of the detainees. He said authorities lacked enough trucks to properly transport them because it was a public holiday. Military officials and witnesses gave varying figures for the number of trucks used, from four to more than 25.

Troops had to “pile them up on top of each other, and they died,” the prime minister said in a short speech to the Senate. “We are sorry for that, sorry they met an untimely death.”

But Thaksin insisted that the military had used “the soft approach” in handling the demonstration, staged in protest of the arrest of six men accused of supplying weapons to militants.

Muslim men detained at the base were being held for interrogation and drug tests, authorities said.