Sri Lanka's government promised yesterday to bring to justice assailants who gunned down two employees at a Tamil Tiger-linked newspaper, describing the brazen assault as an attack on freedom of expression.
Gunmen stormed the office of the independent newspaper on Tuesday in northern Sri Lanka and opened fire, killing two staffers and seriously wounding a third, the editor of the Uthayan newspaper said.
"The government considers this with utmost importance and believes this attack was intended to harm the government's image as a nation with freedom of expression and media independence," an official statement said yesterday.
"The government ... will take every possible step to bring the culprits to book," the statement said.
Dressed in black, the attackers broke into the office of the newspaper -- based in the northern town of Jaffna, 300km north of Colombo -- and began shooting.
Editor N. Vithyatharan said the gunmen demanded to see three reporters who managed to escape the office. He said the newspaper's editorial manager and a circulation assistant had died, and another employee was seriously wounded.
Uthayan is an independent newspaper, but is considered to have close links to Tamil Tiger rebels fighting for a separate homeland for the country's ethnic Tamil minority.
"I have no doubts that this is a work of armed groups working with the government security forces," Vithyatharan said, adding the reason for the attack may have been a cartoon the newspaper published on Monday depicting a former rebel leader prostrating himself before the president.
The person shown in the cartoon, Douglas Devananda, is now a government minister.
Tamil Tiger rebels accuse the government of using other armed Tamil groups to attack the guerrillas. The groups, which once fought alongside the Tigers for a separate state, gave up their struggle after a failed India-arranged peace accord in 1987.
The government has denied backing such groups.
President Mahinda Rajapakse, scheduled to address an international media freedom conference in Colombo yesterday, phoned the newspaper publisher and denied any government involvement in the attack, Vithyatharan said.
"His thinking was that the Tigers had done it ahead of his speech to embarrass him. But we clearly told him that the government should bear the responsibility," Vithyatharan said.
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam rebels have fought the government since 1983 to create a separate nation for ethnic minority Tamils.
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS