A roadside bomb and gun attack killed two Thai military rangers and wounded four others on Saturday, police said, two days after the country held its first formal peace talks with Muslim rebels. The paramilitaries were on their way to attend a colleague's funeral in Pattani province when suspected militants detonated the bomb -- hidden in a motorcycle -- and launched a gun attack, police said. On Friday a bomb had killed a soldier and wounded 14 others in neighbouring Narathiwat province.

Thailand Thursday held its first formal peace talks with a rebel group from its insurgency-racked south as a bombing killed three people in a stark reminder of the difficulties negotiators face. The talks with representatives of the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN) insurgent group, expected to last one day, were to focus on reducing bloodshed, said Thai National Security Council chief Paradorn Pattanatabut, warning the overall peace process would take time.

A Thai man was sentenced to more than three years in prison on Thursday for selling copies of a controversial Australian documentary about Thailand's royal family, his lawyer said. The imprisonment of Eakachai Hongkangwan, 37, is the latest in a series of tough sentences handed down by the kingdom's courts for royal defamation, to the dismay of human rights campaigners.

By Andrew R.C. Marshall DUKU, Thailand (Reuters) - Rusnee Maeloh slept through the 30-minute gunfight that killed her husband, but her neighbours in the notoriously violent Bacho district of southern Thailand heard distant explosions and feared the worst. Mahrosu Jantarawadee, 31, was Rusnee's childhood sweetheart, the father of their two children, and part of a secretive Islamic insurgency fighting a brutal nine-year war with the Thai government that has killed more than 5,300 people.