SRI LANKA:Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers bombed a civilian bus yesterday killing 16 people, mostly women and children during a Buddhist holiday, military officials said, but the rebels denied involvement.
The government condemned what it called a "cowardly terror" attack, which took place in the eastern district of Ampara, taking the death toll from a number of incidents overnight in the north and east to 33.
"There are 16 dead and 25 wounded," an official at the Media Centre for National Security said. "The dead include 11 women, two boys and three adult males. The bomb was inside the bus. Of course it was the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam)."
The attack took place on a day when Sri Lanka's mostly Buddhist Sinhalese majority were marking a full moon holiday with visits to temples.
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, separately, accused the other of shooting dead six ethnic Sinhalese civilians who were building a post-tsunami housing scheme in the eastern district of Batticaloa on Sunday.
The Tigers denied involvement in the attacks, saying they suspected the government or a splinter group of former rebel comrades called the Karuna faction, which analysts say has been helping the military, were trying to tarnish their name.
"We deny this allegation. The LTTE has never targeted civilians during the ceasefire agreement period," rebel humanitarian issues spokeswoman N Selvy said, referring to a 2002 peace pact which is now dead in the water.
"This bus blast has happened near a Sri Lankan army checkpoint. There are several forces working against the LTTE. In the east there is the Karuna faction, or maybe it's the Sri Lankan army trying to discredit us by killing civilians." She accused troops of ruining ethnic Tamil farmland in Ampara by destroying a reservoir and flooding surrounding paddy fields.
The latest attacks 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.
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.
- (Reuters)