BANGKOK - More than 100 people were killed on last Wednesday in dawn clashes between black-clad young men and security forces in Thailand's restive Muslim south when armed gangs raided police posts in a sharp escalation of four months of violence.

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said 107 "bandits" and five soldiers had died in the fighting. Security forces are ready and waiting for trouble.

Five soldiers and two policemen also died after gangs of young men dressed in black and wielding guns, swords and machetes launched the early morning raids on security posts across the troubled region, home to a low-key separatist rebellion in the 1970s and 1980s.

Thailand's three southernmost provinces have been hit by a wave of shootings, bombings and arson attacks that had claimed at least 60 lives since a January 4 raid on an army barracks that left four soldiers dead.

"They attacked five of our police booths in Yala province this morning and we killed 22 of them," provincial police chief Colonel Prinya Kwanyuen told reports.

The largely Muslim province of Yala is 1,300 km (780 miles) south of the capital, Bangkok.

An Interior Ministry official said the attackers were killed in raids across the three southern provinces, including in Pattani province, where a battle was still raging between troops and gunmen holed up in a mosque.

Local television showed heavily armed police and troops taking up positions in rural areas, as well as wounded soldiers from the nearby Malaysian border being unloaded from trucks onto hospital stretchers.

At least one dead soldier was shown lying in the wreckage of a destroyed building.

Rising violence

Despite a huge military clampdown in the south, the violence has shown few signs of abating, leading anaylsts fear the region's disaffected Muslim youth might become a fertile breeding ground for the likes of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

Bangkok has so far blamed the trouble on gangsters exploiting disgruntled elements of the local Malay-speaking population who feel few emotional ties to the predominantly Buddhist country and its distant capital.

However, Yala Governor Boonyasidh Suwannarat said the coordination of attacks at around 5:30am on Tuesday, and the way the assailants were armed, suggested a degree of training.

"This morning showed that they have reached the stage of being confident enough to reveal themselves. Many of them were wearing white or red headbands as identification," he said.

"The type of knives they carried showed that they must have been well trained."

The prime minister, due to travel to the troubled region next week, called an emergency meeting of security officials.

(Agencies via Xinhua)