BANGKOK Suspected terrorists have sneaked into Thailand over the past 12 months to avoid a clampdown in neighbouring Malaysia, a report Saturday quoted Thailand's top military commander as saying.

Supreme Commander General Surayud Chulanont's reported comments mark the first public admission by any senior official from Thailand that members of Muslim extremist groups have entered the country.

Surayud said that while there was no concrete evidence the extremists were planning attacks in Thailand, police were monitoring their movements here, according to the Bangkok Post.

He said they had entered Thailand late last year and this year.

However he was adamant that those who sought refuge in Thailand were not involved in planning or carrying out the October 12 bomb attacks in Bali which killed at least 190 people.

"I insist that those who sneaked into the country have no connection with the Bali bombers," Surayud was quoted by the Bangkok Post as saying.

"But they are facing clampdowns in Malaysia and are related to the KMM (the Kumpulan Mujahideen Malaysia extremist group)."

Sporadic actions now

The Malaysian government has detained several people it believes are members of the Islamic militant Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) organisation, which has been linked to the Bali attacks and the al-Qaeda terrorist network of Osama bin Laden.

Surayud also said Thailand's security problems would intensify if two separatist groups in the majority-Muslim south, the Pattani United Liberation Organisation (PULO) and Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN), were to join forces with the KMM or JI.

PULO was set up at the end of the 1960s to establish an Islamic republic in the south of Thailand, but experts believe it is now capable of little more than limited sporadic actions.

There was no clear evidence that Pulo and BRN have cooperated in any way with KMM or the Indonesia-based JI, Surayud said.

"We are checking if there are other links," he said.

Authorities were seeking cooperation from several parties, particularly the Central Islamic Committee of Thailand, to check if terrorists were posing as religious teachers in the south, the report said.

Since the Bali bombings, Thailand has been at pains to distance itself from the threat of terrorism in an effort to protect its lucrative tourism industry.

Evading capture in M'sia

The government last month rejected reports that terrorists linked to al-Qaeda had entered the kingdom after evading capture in Malaysia and Singapore.

In November the Asian Wall Street Journal said al-Qaeda's top Southeast Asian operative, Riduan Isamuddin, planned the Bali bombing in meetings in southern Thailand, sparking fury in Bangkok and a demand by the government that the Journal issue a correction.

The Journal said that Isamuddin, an Indonesian Islamic militant better known as Hambali, urged Arab and Southeast Asian militants attending a January meeting to attack nightclubs and restaurants. AFP