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.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion