Three people have been detained for questioning after bus bombs blamed on Tamil separatist rebels killed at least 21 people and wounded dozens more, Sri Lanka's Defense Ministry said yesterday.
The insurgents say they were not involved.
The government meanwhile reaffirmed its commitment to the peace process and urged the rebels to resume negotiations.
Security forces said a Tamil rebel suicide bomber killed at least 15 people and wounded 40 more on Saturday on a bus in the coastal town of Meetiyagoda, 95km south of the capital, Colombo, and near several popular resort towns.
It was not clear if the dead bomber was included in the official death toll. Police could not immediately be reached early yesterday.
Less than 24 hours earlier, a bus bomb also blamed on the Tamil Tigers killed at least six people just northeast of Colombo.
Police detained three people late on Saturday in connection with the blast earlier that day, an official at the Defense Ministry's Media Center for National Security said yesterday. The officer, who cannot be named because of military policy, had no other details.
The rebels, formally known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, have been fighting for decades for an independent homeland for the Tamil ethnic minority in Sri Lanka's north and east, because of discrimination at the hands of the majority-Sinhalese government.
As a major foreign donor called for an end to the escalating violence that killed more than 3,600 last year, Sri Lanka's government urged a return to peace talks.
"The government reaffirms its total commitment to a peaceful settlement for the north and east," it said late on Saturday.
"The government appeals to the international community to condemn such acts of terror and prevail on the LTTE to renounce violence and return to the negotiating table," it said.
Japan also called for change in a statement to news organizations.
"These attacks, which deliberately targeted innocent common people, must be condemned as cowardly acts of terrorism, and such incidents must not be repeated in future," the Japanese Embassy said in a statement.
Police said Saturday's blast was triggered by a female Tamil rebel.
"There is a female body inside the bus, and looking at the damage the blast has caused around her, we suspect that she could have been a suicide bomber," senior police official Upul Ariyaratne said.
Violence has risen sharply in Sri Lanka over the past year, but most has occurred in the ethnic Tamil-dominated north and east, where the rebels run their own de facto state in some areas. The latest bloodshed appeared to signal an escalation of the ethnic conflict ravaging the South Asian island nation.
"The LTTE are losing their strength in the east. Because of this, they are targeting innocent civilians," military spokesman Brig. Prasad Samarasinghe said.
The rebels have made suicide bombings a hallmark of their two-decade campaign to carve out a separate state for minority Tamils.
Yet the rebels said they were not involved.
"We totally deny that. We did not do that, that's all I can say," the rebels' military spokesman, Rasiah Ilanthirayan, told reporters by telephone from the group's northern stronghold, Kilinochchi.
On Wednesday, the rebels warned the government of "serious repercussions" for an airstrike they said killed 16 Tamil civilians, including eight children, in a Tiger-controlled northwestern area.
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