Authorities said gunmen fatally shot the president of a Tamil activist group and two Muslim village guards yesterday in separate attacks in eastern Sri Lanka, where recent violence has threatened the country's fragile ceasefire.
Vanniasingham Vigneswaran, president of Trincomalee District Tamil Peoples' Forum, was shot and killed by gunmen as he entered a bank in the eastern port of Trincomalee, said a police official who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.
Earlier, assailants in the eastern village of Welikanda fatally shot two Muslim village guards as they returned home from night duty, military spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe said.
motive unknown
The motive was not immediately known in either attack, and police were investigating.
Vigneswaran was believed to be a supporter of the Tamil Tiger rebels.
Tamilnet, a pro-Tiger Web site, said the Tamil National Alliance party was about to nominate Vigneswaran as a candidate to replace Parliament member Joseph Pararajasingham, who was slain in the eastern city of Batticaloa on Christmas eve.
The Tamil National Alliance is largely seen as the political wing of the Tamil Tiger rebels.
The Web site also said Vigneswaran had been spearheading a campaign to remove a controversial Buddha statue raised in Trincomalee last year and strongly protested by the Tamil Tigers.
Two grenades were lobbed into Vigneswaran's residence by an unidentified attacker in June of last year, according to the Web site.
The latest killings came a critical time. The Sri Lankan government and Tiger rebels are preparing to meet April 19-21 in Geneva for the second session in their latest round of peace talks.
violence
A recent spike in violence that has left at least 166 people dead since December in the north and east -- where the majority of Sri Lanka's 3.2 million Tamils live -- has threatened the ceasefire signed by the government and rebels in 2002.
At the first Geneva meeting in February, both sides pledged to scale down the violence, but the rebels and government have since repeatedly traded accusations of ceasefire violations.
The Geneva meeting was the first high-level contact between the two sides since peace talks broke down in 2003 after six rounds of negotiations.
The Tigers began fighting in 1983 for a separate state for minority Tamils, claiming discrimination by the country's Sinhalese majority. The conflict has cost an estimated 65,000 lives.
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