BANGKOK: Thai army chief General Apirat Kongsompong on Tuesday flew to the Aceh province on Indonesia’s Sumatra island to sign an agreement on security cooperation.
According to the Bangkok Post, Apirat signed the agreement with his Indonesian counterpart General Andika Perkasa, on security cooperation to resolve the southern insurgency.
Apirat earlier said he had spoken to Andika on how to best tackle the unrest in the three southernmost border provin-ces.
His delegation to Aceh included army chief of staff General Thirawat Boonyawat, 4th Army Region commander Lieutenant General Pornsak Poonsawat and director of the Peace Operations Centre of the Internal Security Operations Command Region 4 Forward Command Major General Thira Daewa.
Following the seizure of weapons from a Thai military armoury in a raid in 2004, there have been reports of links between militants in Aceh and insurgents in the south of Thailand.
Muslim separatists in Aceh were reportedly involved in the raid and took some of the stolen weapons for their own fight for independence from Indonesia.
The other stolen guns were kept by the Thai insurgents.
There have also been reports that Aceh separatists sent instructors to train a youth separatist group, Permudaa, at Ponoh Islamic schools in the far south.
Some sympathisers, who were caught at the time, admitted being trained by experts from overseas, but said they did not know where they were from as their faces were covered.
Those involved in the heist also claimed to be members of the Runda Kamputan Kecil separatist group.
The group was named after the training course run by a special task force in Indonesia.
Sonthi Boonyaratglin, who was army chief at the time, had flown to Jakarta to seek help from Indonesian military authorities in investigating the matter.
However, there has been no progress.