Sri Lanka's president vowed yesterday to crush Tamil Tiger rebels after a rush-hour train bombing blamed on the insurgents killed eight passengers and wounded 70 others.
“I will not stop till terrorism is defeated,” Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa told a meeting with media officials, according to a statement from his office.
“No one should have expectations that there will be a letup in the battle against terrorism because of the frenzied attacks” by the rebels, the statement quoted Rajapaksa as saying.
The bomb blast took place inside a train during Monday evening’s rush hour. The train was preparing to leave a station in Dehiwala, just south of Colombo, when the blast tore through it.
Rajapaksa said the rebels had resorted to targeting civilians to divert the government’s attention from its successful operations against them in the north.
BOMBER BOMBED
Meanwhile, the military said air force helicopters bombed and destroyed a rebel explosives storage depot in northern Sri Lanka on Monday, killing a guerrilla bomb-making expert.
The air force targeted the explosives stash in Mannar district’s Andankulam village, a military official said on condition of anonymity, citing government rules.
The official also said separate ground clashes on Monday killed 20 rebels on the northern front lines in the Mannar, Vavuniya and Welioya areas.
Rebel spokesman Rasiah Ilanthirayan could not be reached for comment. It was not possible to get independent confirmation of the military’s claims because reporters are not allowed in the war zone. Each side routinely exaggerates damage inflicted on its enemy and underreports its own losses.
RECENT CLASHES
Government forces and the separatist Tamil Tigers have engaged in violent clashes for the past several months around the guerrillas’ northern stronghold.
Scores of civilians have also been killed in bus and train bombings, most of which the government has blamed on the Tigers. The rebels have denied involvement in some attacks, but have not commented on many others.
The Tamil Tigers have fought since 1983 to create an independent homeland for minority ethnic Tamils, who have faced decades of discrimination at the hands of successive governments controlled by majority Sinhalese.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema