Observation of the Rare Decay B0 --> KsK+/-pi-/+

We report an analysis of charmless hadronic decays of neutral B mesons to the final state KsK+/-pi-/+, using a data sample of (465 +/- 5) x 10^6 BB-bar events collected with the BABAR detector at the Y(4S) resonance. We observe an excess of signal events with a significance of 5.2 standard deviations including systematic uncertainties and measure the branching fraction to be BF(B0 --> KsK+/-pi-/+) = (3.2 +/- 0.5 +/- 0.3) x 10^-6, where the uncertainties are statistical and systematic, respectively.