Blast on Sri Lanka bus kills 15
2007-04-02 13:36
Colombo - Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels
bombed a civilian bus on Monday, killing 15 people, mostly
women and children, military officials said.
The latest attack took place in Ampara district in the
restive east, taking the death toll from a rash of incidents
overnight to 32.
"The bomb was planted inside the bus. The dead included 10
women, 2 children and three men - one of those a policeman and
another a soldier," said a member of the elite police commando
Special Task Force, asking not to be named.
The military earlier said troops killed at least eight Tiger
fighters in a series of mortar bomb exchanges in the northwest
on Sunday, and accused the Tigers of shooting dead two
political activists in northern Vavuniya and a civilian on the
Jaffna peninsula.
Each side accused the other of shooting dead six ethnic
Sinhalese civilians who were building a post-tsunami housing
scheme in the island's eastern district of Batticaloa on
Sunday.
"Troops have seen at least eight bodies of dead Tigers
after several clashes in Mannar," military spokesperson brigadier
Prasad Samarasinghe said. "We believe other cadres were badly
injured."
He said the six tsunami construction workers were all shot
dead, an eerie reminder of the massacre of 17 local staff of
French aid group Action Contre la Faim, who were shot in the
head execution-style last year in an attack truce monitors have
blamed on the military.
'Serial abuses'
The killings come amid near-daily air raids, land and sea
battles and ambushes that have killed around 4 000 people in
the past 15 months alone, and as rights groups denounce both
sides for serial abuses and lobby for an international rights
monitoring mission.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa's majority-Sinhalese government
is set to call on its South Asian neighbours to forge a common
anti-terror drive at a regional summit in New Delhi this week.
The Tigers were not immediately available for comment on
the bus blast. They earlier denied they were behind the killing
of the tsunami construction workers, blaming their fatal
shootings on the government or a splinter group of former rebel
comrades called the Karuna faction, which analysts say has been
helping the military.
"We had nothing to do with the killing of those civilians,"
rebel humanitarian issues spokesperson N Selvy said by
telephone from the Tigers' northern stronghold of Kilinochchi.
"We blame this on the government or the Karuna group," she
added, accusing troops of ruining ethnic Tamil farmland in the
eastern district of Ampara by destroying a reservoir and
flooding surrounding paddy fields.
Extrajudicial killings, abductions and rights abuses have
mushroomed in recent months, and an internationally-appointed
panel of experts is observing a presidential probe into a host
of killings blamed on each side.
- Reuters