Thailand's junta government detains Muslim students arbitrarily: Human Rights Watch

International human rights organization, Human Rights Watch (HRW), has asked Thailand's junta to "immediately" confirm the whereabouts of 17 Muslim students it says were arbitrarily arrested in the country's Muslim south on Thursday.

"The activists should be freed unless they have been charged by a judge with a credible offence," Human Rights Watch said in a statement on Saturday.

The men were reportedly arrested early morning April 2 at four student dormitories in a university in Muang district of Narathiwat province.

HRW said that the military forced at least 17 from the network of ethnic Malay Muslim students to give DNA samples and then took them into custody and that authorities have provided no explanation for the students' detention or said when they would be released.

"Arbitrary arrests, secret detention, and unaccountable officials are a recipe for human rights abuses," said Brad Adams, the organization's Asia director.

"The use of martial law to detain student activists shows how out of control the Thai military authorities have become."

The men are among 39 rounded up in Thailand's south - which has been wracked by violence since 2004 - in the last ten days,

On March 25, authorities launched a raid on a construction site, after informers warned of an impending attack on To Chud village in Pattani.

Four men aged between 23- and 32-years-old were killed in the ensuing raid by a joint military and police team.

Authorities detained 22 others in military camps, and interrogated them about possible connections to an insurgency, which has wracked the region for close to 50 years.

Of the 22 arrested March 25, 18 have since been released.

Human Rights Watch has repeatedly raised serious concerns regarding the use of arbitrary arrest and secret military detention in Thailand's three southernmost Thai provinces-Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat - which were constituted an independent Islamic sultanate until the area was incorporated into Siam (Thailand) after a 1909 Anglo-Siamese agreement.

Since January 2004, the area has been the scene of a brutal internal armed conflict that has claimed more than 6,000 lives.

Civilians have accounted for approximately 90 percent of those deaths.

The organization said that to date not a single member of the Thai security forces has been criminally prosecuted for serious rights abuses in the south.

"Violent insurgency is no excuse for the Thai military to resort to summary and abusive measures against the Malay Muslim population," Adams said.

"It's very worrying that soldiers continue to arrest and detain anyone they want."