Suspected Tamil rebels detonated a roadside bomb in northern Sri Lanka yesterday, killing one soldier and wounding two others, while three military camps in the east came under rebel mortar fire, the Defense Ministry said.
Shot
Separately, three Tamil men, aged between 24 and 27 years old, were dragged out of their homes in the small eastern town of Valaichchenai and fatally shot, M. Vijayanayake, the area's police chief, said.
He declined to provide a motive behind the Sunday night slayings, saying an investigation was ongoing.
"We can't say who has done this," he said, adding that Tamil Tiger rebels and their main rivals, a splinter faction known as Karuna, were both active in the region.
Yesterday, a bomb targeted a military foot patrol in Point Pedro, a small port town on the northern tip of the Jaffna Peninsula, military spokesman, Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe said. One soldier was killed and two others wounded, he said.
Mortar
Hours earlier, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam rebels fired as many as 20 mortar rounds at three military camps in eastern Batticaloa district, Samarasinghe said.
"We had taken defensive and protective measures and we suffered no casualties," he said, adding that some of the mortars fell outside the camps, which were well fortified with bunkers.
Samarasinghe said the military retaliated with artillery fire, but he had no information about possible rebel casualties.
Batticaloa has become a hotbed of continuing violence between the military and separatist rebels, who are fighting for an independent homeland in the northeast for the country's 3.1 million ethnic Tamils, who have faced decades of discrimination by the majority Sinhalese.
RSS