Deadly raid heightens Sri Lanka civil war fears
Tamil Tiger rebels have shelled Sri Lanka army positions and launched a deadly raid on a breakaway faction they say is backed by the Sri Lankan government, while a Tamil civilian was shot dead, officials said, heightening fears of a return to civil war.
The violence yesterday added urgency to efforts by European cease-fire monitors to get the government and rebels to resume peace talks.
Near-daily violence over the past week – including a suicide attack by a suspected rebel targeting Sri Lanka’s top military general last week – could push relations between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam to the point of collapse.
The monitors over the weekend accused both sides of violating the four-year-old cease-fire and said they feared security forces may have been involved in extra-judicial killings of civilians in Tamil-majority areas. The government denied the charge.
Early yesterday, the mainstream rebels overran three camps operated by a breakaway faction in the village of Welikanda in the eastern district of Batticaloa, killing 15 members, Pakkiyaraja Thayamohan, LTTE’s political head in Batticaloa, told The Associated Press.
The mainstream rebels accuse the military of backing the renegade group, an accusation the military denies.
An official of the breakaway group said five of their members were killed and 15 wounded. The official, V. Kuiyan, said they killed eight members of the mainstream group. The contradicting claims could not be independently clarified.
Later yesterday, Tamil Tiger rebels fired artillery at two army positions in eastern Sri Lanka, and the soldiers retaliated, military spokesman Brig. Prasad Samarasinghe said.
The attacks came in the eastern Trincomalee district and no casualties were reported, he said.
Also yesterday, suspected rebels detonated an anti-personnel mine in northern Sri Lanka, injuring two navy sailors, the defence ministry said.
The Tamil Tigers split in 2004 when a powerful leader from the east, known as Karuna, broke away from the northern group with about 6,000 fighters.
The uprising was ruthlessly suppressed later by the main rebel group, but sympathy for the breakaway leader remains strong among some Tamils in the east.
In a separate incident yesterday, unidentified gunmen fatally shot a Tamil civilian, Jaya Prakash, in Jaffna, 300 kilometres (185 miles) north of Colombo.
Soldiers at a nearby checkpoint shot at the fleeing gunmen, who escaped, apparently with some injuries, an officer at the army media unit said.
The motive behind the killing was not known.
Relations between the government and the LTTE have sharply deteriorated after a suspected rebel suicide bomber attacked the country’s top military general in Colombo on Tuesday. The general was seriously injured and 11 people were killed.
The government ordered retaliatory air strikes that killed 12 people and displaced thousands in the northeast.
The recent violence between the Tigers and the government has raised fears of a return to civil war in the South Asian nation, where a two-decade civil war was halted by a 2002 cease-fire.
A bomb exploded in a residential neighbourhood of Trincomalee in north-eastern Sri Lankan today, killing four civilians and wounding four Sri Lankan navy officers, police and witnesses said.
The bomb apparently was aimed at a vehicle carrying the naval officers when it exploded, killing the four civilian bystanders, said a police officer, who identified himselfas the area’s chief inspector. He did not give his name.
There was a pool of blood on the road, as residents and police tried to help. The officer blamed the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels for the attack.
