Sri Lankan air force bombs Tamil Tiger base
Sri Lanka’s air force said it bombed a Tamil Tiger rebel naval base in the country’s north-west today, but a guerrilla spokesman claimed the air raid killed 15 civilians in a fishing village.
Rebel spokesman Rasiah Ilanthirayan said the bombs fell on the village of Padahuthurai near Iluppaikkdavai in north-west Sri Lanka’s Mannar district, killing at least 15 civilians and wounding 35 others. Ilanthirayan spoke from the rebel headquarters of Kilinochchi.
An air force spokesman, Grp. Cap. Ajantha Silva, told a news conference that the planes targeted a base of the Sea Tigers, the naval wing of the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels.
“We are very sure about the target, that it was a Sea Tiger base, in fact the area’s main Sea Tiger base,” Silva said.
“Whenever we attack their camps and bases they come up this type of story,” Silva said of the rebel claim that the victims were civilians and not Sea Tiger members.
The airforce also targeted rebel mortar positions in eastern Batticaloa district, Silva said.
Rebel spokesman Ilanthirayan said the death toll in the Mannar raid was likely to rise because 26 of the 35 wounded people were in serious condition.
He said 25 of the 30 houses in the village had been destroyed.
There was no way to independently verify the conflicting claims.
Silva said the planes had successfully hit the rebels’ mortar positions in the air raids in Batticaloa, a hotbed of violence between the rebels and military.
The rebels have been fighting for an independent homeland in the north and east for the country’s 3.1 million ethnic Tamils, who have suffered decades of discrimination by the majority Sinhalese.
Sri Lanka’s civil war eased in 2002 when Norway brokered a cease-fire, but the truce has recently come under serious threat with near-daily violence. At least 3,689 combatants and civilians were killed in fighting last year, according to the Defence Ministry’s latest figures.
Before the cease-fire, the conflict claimed the lives of about 65,000 people and displaced another 1.6 million.
