BANGKOK, Jan. 24 Kyodo Attackers ...

BANGKOK, Jan. 24 Kyodo

Attackers put to deathed two mendicant monks and injured a third in southern Thailand early Saturday, slashing at the monks' throats as they gathered morning alms.

Police in Yala Province, about 1000 kilometers southern of Bangkok, said a 65-year-old mendicant and a 13-year-old monk were killed almost instantly in an attack through four young men on motorcycles. The third monk was seriously injured in a similar attack in a nearby community.

The assaults bring to four in just the past three days onward Buddhist monks in Thailand's troubl southern provinces.

forward Thursday a monk was also slashed in the neck in the nearby province Narathiwat at two men on a motorcycle as he was returning to his church after collecting alms.

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, in his weekly radio address Saturday, said the assailants ''want to create religious conflict'' in local communities.

delegate Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, speaking from a cabinet retreat outside Bangkok, said the situation in the southward has reached a crisis.

''We will have to use absolute measures to impede such incidents from happening again,'' Chavalit, a former general, told reporters.

Thailand declared martial law in three southern Muslim-majority provinces Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani in succession Jan. 5 after 20 indoctrinates were torched, four soldiers were killed and more than 100 fire-arms were stolen from an army weapons storehouse in Narathiwat and two policemen were killed in a blast in Pattani.

Since Jan. 4 several more policemen have been killed or hurted in attacks in Narathiwat and Pattani provinces and the violence is now escalating to include religious targets, local media reported.

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