Bangkok (AsiaNews/Agencies) - A bomb hidden in a motorcycle exploded in a busy market in Thailand's restive Muslim south on Wednesday, killing two Buddhist women and a soldier and wounding 13 shoppers, police said.

Both women were teachers and one was three months pregnant, police said. They said the soldier, also Buddhist, died on the way to the hospital.

"The bomb was hidden in a motorcycle that was parked next to a truck bringing soldiers to the market to buy their daily stuff," police Colonel Somporn Meesuk said from the scene in the province of Pattani.

The truck was parked in front of a small restaurant where people were queuing up to buy food, he said. Police still could not say how the bomb, which destroyed three motorcycles, was detonated although militants often set them off using mobile phones.

Violence in Thailand's Muslim-dominated southern provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat dates back to 4 January 2004, when a group of Islamic militants raided an arms depot in Narathiwat, on the border with Malaysia. Since then more than 1,300 people have been killed in a struggle born of organized crime, local corruption and Islamic extremism, which aims for independence from the rest of the Buddhist-majority country.