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Thousands on the run to escape latest fighting in Sri Lanka

Thousands of Tamil civilians were on the run in north Sri Lanka yesterday as troops and Tiger rebels traded artillery fire across a de facto border, with both sides claiming heavy casualties.

The rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) said about 2,000 men, women and children fled their homes in the district of Mannar where heavy fighting has raged since Thursday.

One government soldier was killed and three more wounded in Mannar District in the latest shelling, the defence ministry said yesterday. It said troops retaliated in kind and inflicted unspecified casualties on the guerrillas.

The ministry said they estimated that at least 49 Tiger rebels were killed in the latest fighting. The military placed its own losses at 10 killed and 46 seriously wounded, with another 45 listed as minor casualties.

For their part, the LTTE said they lost 13 of their combatants and claimed to have killed 60 government troops. Both sides are known to overestimate the losses suffered by the other.

Thousands of civilians living along the de facto border separating Tamil Tiger territory from the rest of the island fled to the safety of public buildings to avoid shelling by both sides, local officials said.

They said about 300 civilians had crossed the front lines on Saturday and entered government-held areas, where they were provided with food by government troops.

The Tigers said the refugee crisis in Mannar has compounded problems for relief workers already grappling to feed nearly 300,000 internally displaced people in the island's embattled regions.

The rebels yesterday accused the army of planting a roadside bomb that killed a local aid worker and wounded three others when it exploded near their vehicle in Mannar on Saturday.

"This is the work of the Sri Lankan army's deep penetrating unit," LTTE spokeswoman Navaruban Selvy said by telephone from her office in the rebel-held town of Kilinochchi, about 300km north of the capital.

"The victims were trying to arrange relief for the civilians recently displaced as a result of the latest fighting," she said.

The worker was a volunteer with the Tamils' Rehabilitation Organization, a local charity that operates refugee centers and distributes aid in rebel territory.

Sri Lanka's military denies carrying out bomb attacks inside rebel-held territory, but military sources have acknowledged that small groups of troops are operating behind rebel lines.

The report of the blast came as the defense ministry said it had killed two suspected Tamil Tiger rebels in the northern peninsula of Jaffna, on Saturday.
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