A powerful roadside bomb exploded in Thailand’s restive Muslim south on Friday, likely killing two soldiers and seriously wounding eight, police said.

The bomb, hidden next to a highway in the southern province of Narathiwat, went off as a truck loaded with 10 soldiers drove by on an evening patrol, police said.

“Eight of them were critically injured. We believe the other two might have been killed because we found a head, legs and other body parts at the scene,” Somchai Sawasdisak, police colonel for Bajoh district, told Reuters.

It was the latest violence in Thailand’s southern region where more than 600 people have died since January 2004 in nearly daily gun and bomb attacks blamed by the government on Muslim militants.

On Thursday, four bombs exploded in the neighbouring provinces of Yala and Songkhla, wounding at least nine people. Another five police officers were wounded when they detonated a bomb found in Songkhla.

Separatists fought low-key insurgencies in the 1970s and 1980s in the largely Malay speaking region bordering Malaysia.