Twenty-three suspected drug traffickers have been killed...

Twenty-three suspected drug traffickers have been killed since Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's most recent war on drugs got under way, police in Thailand reported.
There is little sympathy for drug peddlers in Thailand but many people are concerned that once again, victory will only be declared over the dead bodies of victims of extrajudicial killings.
Police said their bullets accounted for only four of the 23 dead. But their claim merely served to highlight the authorities' shadowy ways of perpetuating a crackdown; few observers believe that a gang war has spontaneously broken out to coincide with the premier's three-month-old campaign.
Somchai Homlaor, secretary-general of the Asia Forum human rights group, said: "The only sensible conclusion is the police are sending out death squads."
A military source said that since part of the drug trade is carried out by corrupt police, these bad eggs have good reason to dispose of people who might confess in the face of a new government policy of carrying out the death penalty for traffickers.
The army officer said: "The first few killings might have been simple assassinations, but once the traffickers know that they will almost certainly be killed, they start to fight back. So yes, in that sense, you have battles between drug gangs."
Previous campaigns of this type have also ended with a pile of corpses tagged with "resisted arrest" labels by a force that apparently fears no investigation.
Many officials have competed with each other to combat the drug menace, so that an attempt in 2002 to turn Kalasin province in the northeast into the country's first drug-free zone was achieved with what local officials called "justified extrajudicial killing".
Critics of the current campaign say that rewards offered to the police for drug seizures and for every arrested "major trafficker" merely tempt them to hunt for more bodies.