Bangkok, May17, 2010 :Anti-government protesters in Thailand have been ordered to leave the area they are occupying in central Bangkok by 3pm local time (9am GMT) as the spiralling violence spread to other cities in Thailand.

The new deadline is the latest in a series of clearance and curfew orders. Last night the government lifted a curfew order which was to be put in place after deciding it made life too difficult for residents inside the elite area occupied by the Redshirts for the last several weeks.

It comes as a rogue Thai general who helped anti-government Redshirts died in hospital after being shot by a sniper while he was being interviewed by a journalist.The attack on Mr Khattiya, which his family claim was planned in advance, triggered bloody street battles between anti-government protesters and the army that has led to 36 deaths.

Chiaranai Matchakijborikarn, Mr Khattiya’s elder sister, claimed today that her brother’s assassination was planned, although she would not say by whom. “My brother had learned that he would be assassinated in one month”, Mrs Chiaranai said.

The Red Shirts, who want Mr Abhisit to resign and dissolve his party are an increasingly broad movement, but at their core are poor farmers from the northern provinces.

The area they have occupied for the last few weeks is one of the glitziest in South-East Asia, a consumer paradise of department stores and five-star hotels, as well as foreign embassies

Yesterday the Government of the Prime Minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, indignantly rejected a proposal by Red Shirt leaders for negotiations mediated by the United Nations. “As for the call of UN interference, no governments allow any organisations to intervene in their internal affairs,” Panitan Wattanayagorn, the government spokesman, said after a state of emergency was declared in five more of Thailand’s provinces.

At one end, soldiers armed with M16 rifles crouched behind sandbags, pointing their weapons down the street. In the alleys leading off it crouched young men armed with stones and firecrackers and boxes of petrol bombs, which they used to ignite the tyre barricades.

Each petrol bomb was met with a fusillade of automatic rifle fire. Even in the afternoon sun could see the luminescence of the tracer rounds, and the bullets dislodged chunks of wood from the telegraph poles along the street.