Colombo airport reopens after rebel attack
Sri Lanka’s international airport reopened today and police arrested three Tamils as suspects in a daring rebel attack that left 20 people dead a day earlier.
Soldiers fired at another man in a field near the airport, but he escaped, a few hours before the first flight landed.
It was a Sri Lankan Airlines Airbus A340 bringing 180 passengers from Madras, India, where they had been diverted by the rebel attack.
With all the Sri Lankan Airlines planes on the apron damaged or destroyed, none of the 4,000 foreign tourists and other travellers stranded could leave until the diverted flights began returning.
When soldiers opened fire on the unidentified man near the airport, it renewed the fear that swept through the terminals on Tuesday, when explosions, flames and gunfire announced the attack by Tamil Tiger rebels.
Twenty people - 13 rebels and seven military personnel - were killed, while 11 commercial and military aircraft were destroyed and others were damaged.
Fifteen civilians, including a Russian crewman on a passenger plane, were wounded.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who have been fighting since 1983 for a Tamil homeland in the north and east, are outlawed as a terrorist group in the United States, Britain, India and Sri Lanka. More than 64,000 people have been killed in the 18 year war. The rebels say Sri Lanka’s Tamils face discrimination at the hands of the majority Sinhalese.
Britain joined the United States in issuing a travel warning today urging citizens to avoid Sri Lanka. The
Police said they detained three Tamil men, aged between 20 and 24, during searches of the towns near the airport and were questioning them about the attack.
While authorities allowed passengers leaving Sri Lanka into the airport terminal today, relatives who came to pick up travellers were turned away by soldiers at security blocks along the road to the airport. It was a new security measure.
In the capital, Colombo, 18 miles) from the airport, an unusually high number of police patrolled the streets with automatic weapons and kept watch at intersections.
Opposition political parties and even the state-run newspaper took the government to task, asking how such a daring attack could take place in a maximum security zone, which includes a key air force base.
‘‘How could this devastating operation take place in a location where security could be expected to be exceedingly tight?’’ the state-run Daily News asked in an editorial.
The leader of the main opposition United National Party, Ranil Wickremesinghe, said the government used soldiers and police to crack down on opposition demonstrations, while leaving security gaps in important places.
