  We show that the group of type-preserving automorphisms of any irreducible
semi-regular thick right-angled building is abstractly simple. When the
building is locally finite, this gives a large family of compactly generated
(abstractly) simple locally compact groups. Specializing to appropriate cases,
we obtain examples of such simple groups that are locally indecomposable, but
have locally normal subgroups decomposing non-trivially as direct products.
