Two bombs explode in southern Thailand's Pattani

One person has been killed and 30 others injured after two bombs exploded in a busy nightlife district in Thailand's troubled southern province of Pattani, according to local news media.

The first bomb targeted a pub and karaoke bar late on Tuesday causing no casualties, before a second blast struck the same area 20 minutes later in an apparent "double-tap attack", the Bangkok Post newspaper said.

The second bomb was designed "to maximise casualties", Yutthanam Petchmuang, a spokesman for Internal Security Operations Command, told local broadcaster Spring News.

"The second explosion came from a truck parked at the hotel entrance ... resulting in one death and 30 injuries."

A staff member at the town’s hospital said 32 people were injured, five of them critically. All are Thai nationals, the worker added, asking not to be named.

Most embassies warn nationals against all travel to Pattani because of the long-running conflict between the Buddhist-majority state and shadowy Muslim rebels seeking greater autonomy.

The blasts came less than two weeks after a series of explosions hit three of Thailand’s most popular tourist resorts and a town in the south of the country, killing four people and wounding dozens.

Tourism is one of the only growth sectors in Thailand, and accounts for 10% of an economy that has struggled under the stewardship of a military government that seized power two years ago.

No group has claimed responsibility for the wave of bombings, but some security experts noted at the time that southern insurgent groups have a track record of carrying out coordinated bombing attacks.

Since 2004, a low-intensity but brutal war between government troops and insurgents has killed more than 6,500 people in the southern provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat that border Malaysia.

The three provinces soundly rejected a referendum earlier this month on the new military-backed constitution, which passed convincingly in most of the rest of the country.

The latest bombings came a year after an attack on a Hindu shrine, crowded with tourists in central Bangkok, killed 20 people and wounded more than 120. Police have accused two ethnic Uighur Muslims from China of the August 2015 attack.