A Sri Lankan minister was killed by a roadside bomb planted by suspected Tamil Tiger rebels north of the capital on Tuesday, the second MP killed in a week as a protracted civil war escalates. Nation Building Minister DM Dassanayake died on the operating table, said the deputy director of the government teaching hospital.
Nordic ceasefire monitors began wrapping up their six-year mission to Sri Lanka on Friday after the government scrapped a truce with the Tamil Tigers, and their mandate, amid a chorus of international concern. The government formally notified mediator Norway late on Thursday it was giving a stipulated 14-day notice period to end the truce.
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/ 2 November 2007
Tamil Tiger political wing leader SP Thamilselvan was killed in a Sri Lankan air force bombing raid early on Friday, the rebels said, in what analysts said was a body-blow to any hope of ending renewed civil war soon. Thamilselvan was the rebels’ main interlocutor at the last round of peace talks with the Sri Lankan government in October 2006.
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/ 1 November 2007
Sri Lankan troops killed 31 Tamil Tigers fighters in a series of clashes in the north of the island, as warplanes bombed rebel training camps on Thursday, the military said. Two soldiers were also killed and 17 wounded in the clashes with the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
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/ 22 October 2007
The Tamil Tigers air wing bombed a north Sri Lanka air force base before dawn on Monday, the military said, while the Tigers said suicide fighters mounted their biggest ground assault since the two-decade civil war began. The rebel air strike in the north-central district of Anuradhapura comes months after the Tigers’ first-ever air attacks using light aircraft.
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/ 21 September 2007
Sri Lankan fighter jets bombed a Tamil Tiger military base in the rebel-held far north on Friday, triggering multiple explosions, the air force said, while a suspected rebel roadside bomb killed one civilian in the east. The air strike targeted top leaders of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
Sri Lankan troops killed about 30 Tamil Tigers in a clash overnight in jungle in the island’s restive east, the military said on Wednesday, hours after the navy said it had killed about 40 insurgents in a sea battle. The military said soldiers had captured a rebel bunker line during the fight in a swathe of landlocked eastern jungle called Thoppigala.
Suspected Tamil Tiger rebels attacked a police commando truck with a roadside bomb on Monday just south of the capital Colombo, killing seven civilians and wounding 36 other people, the military said. Monday’s bombing came just days after suspected Tigers targeted an army bus near the entrance to Colombo port.
A Tamil Tiger suicide bomber tried to blow up an army camp in Sri Lanka on Tuesday, killing seven people a day after rebels carried out their first air strike since fighting began in 1983. The military said troops shot the suicide bomber as he tried to drive an explosives-laden tractor into the camp in the eastern district of Batticaloa.
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/ 16 October 2006
Suspected Tamil Tiger rebels rammed a truck loaded with explosives into a Sri Lankan naval convoy on Monday, killing at least 92 people and deepening pessimism over this month’s planned peace talks. The attack near the town of Habarana, about 190km north-east of the capital Colombo, was one of the worst suicide bombings in the troubled Indian Ocean island.