Three members of a Malaysian television crew covering the troubles in Thailand's Muslim-majority south were detained by Thai authorities and questioned for five hours, a crew member said today.

The Thai military seized two small cameras and a video cassette containing interviews with local residents calling for justice for 87 Muslims who died after the army broke up a demonstration last month, producer Fadzli Ramli, 37, told AFP .

The crew, from the independent NTV7 station, had just concluded an interview with the principal of an Islamic school last Saturday and were headed for Pattani province when they were stopped by police at a roadblock.

Upon seeing their camera equipment, police detained and questioned them for an hour, Fadzli said. They were then handed over to the military, who interrogated them for four hours.

The army officers viewed all 10 video cassettes in their possession "as they suspected us of trying to create a negative image of their government. We just want to portray the real situation there."

Two spy-cameras seized

A video cassette containing interviews with local residents in Yala was seized along with two spy-cameras, he said.

"They said we needed authorisation to film in southern Thailand now that it is under military rule."

After their release, the crew continued filming in Pattani, Narathiwat and Tak Bai, where the 87 Muslim demonstrators died, most of them suffocating after being bound and piled in the back of army trucks.

That incident outraged many Malaysians, who share a kinship with the Muslims across the border.

More than 550 people have been killed since January in separatist-inspired violence that has been confined mainly to Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala, the three southern provinces of the mainly Buddhist kingdom.

Only four percent of Thais are Muslims but most of them live in the south, the scene of a sporadic decades-old revolt against Thai rule.