Sri Lanka's navy said it destroyed two Tamil Tiger rebel boats yesterday, as the craft were hauling hundreds of thousands of steel balls often used in bombs.
Meanwhile, the military said it launched air strikes on a Tiger artillery position in the northern Jaffna peninsula.
The rebels said the bombing targeted civilian areas.
Navy spokesman D.K.P. Dassanayake said divers retrieved 28 bags filled with hundreds of thousands of steel balls from the sunken boats. Such balls are used in roadside bombs -- a favored weapon of the Tigers, who are fighting for a separate homeland for ethnic Tamils.
"The navy spotted two suspicious boats off the west coast and fired warning shots into the air to stop them," Dassanayake said. "Then those two boats fired at naval boats and the navy retaliated, sinking them."
Dassanayake said naval divers also found an automatic rifle, ammunition and a satellite phone from the two boats, which he said had left from nearby India.
No immediate comment was available from the Tigers, formally called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
The military also said a Tiger artillery position was bombed yesterday.
"Our air force took the target as the LTTE was firing from that position at our troops in the area," military spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe said.
The rebels, however, accused the air force of bombing "civilian settlements."
"Two Sri Lankan air force Kfirs and two MiGs carried out aerial attacks on [the] Kilali, Nagarkovil and Palai settlements," the Tigers said in a statement, without giving casualty figures.
The military denied bombing civilian villages. There was no way to reconcile the contradicting claims.
RSS