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Blast on Sri Lanka bus kills 15

2007-04-02 13:36
line

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.

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Oom says... I wonder is we (S.A) have any arrangement with the USA and the UK to use our ports and airfields if needed in time of war..?? Read the article...

 
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