Unidentified gunmen shot and killed pro-rebel legislator Joseph Pararajasingham as he attended midnight Mass at a church in eastern Sri Lanka, the Defense Ministry said yesterday, sparking fears of a return to civil war in the island nation.
The attackers fired at Pararajasingham, 71, during the Christmas service at St. Michael's Church in Batticaloa, the site of frequent skirmishes between rebel factions, military spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe said.
Pararajasingham's wife and eight others, were injured in the shooting and are being treated in local hospitals. Pararajasingham's bodyguards returned fire, but the assailants escaped.
A police officer in Batticaloa, eastern Sri Lanka's main town, said the lawmaker died instantly after two assailants fired four shots into his chest.
Pro-independence
Pararajasingham represented the Tamil National Alliance, a proxy party of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which has been fighting the government for two decades for a Tamil homeland for Sri Lanka's 3.2 million ethnic Tamil minority.
A pro-rebel Web site reported the incident without comment. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but a breakaway faction of the rebels is known to oppose the Alliance.
Batticaloa was the scene of several bloody battles between the rebels after a powerful eastern commander and his followers split from the main insurgency group last year.
The uprising was ruthlessly suppressed by the main rebel group, but sympathy for the breakaway leader -- known as Karuna -- remains strong among Tamils in the east.
The Tigers also accuse the Sri Lankan military of backing Karuna's faction, an accusation the military denies.
The slaying drew a sharp reaction from the Tamil National Alliance, which accused the government of having a hand in the assassination.
Targeting key Tamil political actors to weaken the rebel cause is a strategy "adopted by the Sri Lankan state," S. Jeyananthamoorthy, an Alliance lawmaker, was quoted as saying by the pro-rebel Web site, TamilNet.
potential disaster
"This strategy will fail and in its wake likely bring an unprecedented catastrophe to Sri Lanka," TamilNet quoted him as saying, without elaborating.
The shooting came as envoys from Japan, Britain, Norway and the EU -- key backers of Sri Lanka's peace process -- met with the rebels' political leader, S. P. Thamilselvan, on Saturday in the northern guerrilla stronghold of Kilinochchi to raise concerns about the growing violence.
Violence has also escalated in Sri Lanka's ethnic Tamil-majority north and parts of the east since mainstream rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran threatened to resume his struggle for an independent Tamil homeland if the government fails to address Tamils' grievances.
The Tamil Tigers started fighting in 1983 for a separate Tamil homeland in the island nation's north and east, claiming discrimination by the majority Sinhalese. The conflict killed about 65,000 people.
Pararajasingham started his career as a junior government official in his hometown of Batticaloa and entered parliament in 1990, where he was a vocal advocate for the Tamil minority.
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