Sri Lankan war planes bombed Tamil Tiger positions for a fourth straight day Saturday, killing at least eight more rebels, the guerrillas said, as their threadbare truce came under more strain.
COLOMBO: Sri Lankan war planes bombed Tamil Tiger positions for a fourth straight day Saturday, killing at least eight more rebels, the guerrillas said, as their threadbare truce came under more strain.
The pro-rebel Tamilnet.com website said Israeli-built Kfir jets bombed and destroyed a conference center of the guerrillas deep inside rebel-held territory in the district of Batticaloa.
"Eight Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) cadres were killed and four wounded when Sri Lanka air force bombed Tigers' Thenaham Conference Centre in Karadiyanaru," Tamilnet said.
The aircraft also bombed another location of the Tigers further north in the neighbouring district of Trincomalee, officials said, adding security forces had no details of casualties.
The bombings escalated after Finland and Denmark said they would withdraw their nationals from the Swedish-led Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) in line with a demand by Tigers that they quit before September 1.
Sri Lankan spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella said they were yet to be formally informed by Denmark and Finland of their decisions to quit, but Colombo would resist any moves to reconstitute the SLMM without first being consulted.
"We are against any unilateral move," Rambukwella said. "There is a ceasefire agreement and according to that any decision to change the SLMM must be done through consultations with all."
The LTTE has demanded that observers from European Union members Finland, Denmark and Sweden leave the island after the EU added it to a list of "terrorist" organisations in May. That would leave only Norwegian and Icelandic monitors.
Finland and Denmark announced the pullout Friday. Sweden has yet to announce its stand. Rambukwella, who is Policy Planning Minister and government spokesman on defence-related matters, said the bombing campaign was aimed at opening an irrigation canal shut down by the Tigers.
SLMM members had gone to the area in a bid to settle the water issue, Rambukwella said. Residents were yet to receive water by Saturday morning. Officials said artillery exchanges followed air strikes that began Wednesday, further undermining the ceasefire that has been in place since February 2002.
The LTTE said it lost six members on Thursday and another were five wounded. Two policemen were shot dead in Trincomalee on Friday by suspected Tiger gunmen, police said, pushing the death toll since violence flared in December to at least 910. Peacebroker Norway is to send special envoy Jon Hansse-Bauer here next month to try to salvage the ceasefire, diplomats said.
Britain's deputy high commissioner Lesley Craig met the Tiger leadership in the rebel-held town of Kilinochchi on Friday and asked them to honour the ceasefire and move towards negotiations, the high commission (embassy) said.
"We stressed the need to dialogue," the mission said after Craig held talks with the leader of the Tigers' political wing, S.P. Thamilselvan. More than 60,000 people have been killed in the three-decade-old Tamil separatist conflict.
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