Tamil Tiger rebels and government troops exchanged artillery fire in Sri Lanka's ethnic Tamil heartland yesterday, the military said, a day after talks to salvage a ceasefire and halt more than two decades of conflict ended without a breakthrough.
The peace talks in Geneva failed on Sunday after the government rejected a Tiger demand to reopen a key highway that connects the Tamil-dominated northern peninsula of Jaffna with the rest of the country.
The rebels opened fire late on Sunday, wounding five soldiers, then the artillery fire began, targeting an entry point to the blocked highway, military spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe said.
"They fired at our positions and we fired back," he said.
Rebel spokesman Daya Master accused the military of starting the exchange, and said he was checking reports on the skirmish.
Separately, unidentified gunmen killed a Tamil civilian in Jaffna, witnesses said, without giving names due to fear of reprisals.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam alleged during the talks that the army was preparing for a major assault in the north -- an allegation the military denied yesterday.
The Geneva talks were aimed at salvaging a 2002 ceasefire that has been all but destroyed by a major surge in violence this year.
The talks ended Sunday with the two sides failing to even agree on a date for further talks, said Erik Solheim, Norway's minister for international development and its peace envoy to Sri Lanka.
The Tigers' negotiators have cut short a planned visit to Norway and Iceland and will return home immediately, the top guerrilla leader said yesterday.
The head of the Tigers' political wing, S.P. Thamilselvan, said the visit to the two countries providing staff for the truce monitoring mission because the talks failed to bring any results.
"Our people are anxious to know first hand from us what happened in Geneva," Thamilselvan said at his hotel in Geneva.
"Whether there will be war or peace in Sri Lanka now is in the hands of the Sri Lankan government," he said.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
RSS