Sri Lankan air force jets bombed two Tamil Tiger bases in the country's northwest yesterday, the military said.
"Two bases of the Sea Tigers were bombed today," military spokesman, Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe said.
The Sea Tigers are the naval wing of the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels, who say they are fighting to create a separate homeland for the country's 3.2 million ethnic Tamil minority.
"We have destroyed both the bases," Samarasinghe said, adding that he had no details on casualties.
The attack came one day after a roadside bomb exploded in Sri Lanka's northern Jaffna peninsula, killing one soldier and wounding three others, the military said, blaming Tamil Tiger insurgents for the blast.
"We suffered casualties, but our troops did not fire back as there was a presence of civilians in the area,'' Samarasinghe said.
The incident late on Tuesday was the latest in a spike in violence that has pushed the tropical island closer to all-out war.
The military, also late on Tuesday, found a similar explosive near the town of Ampara, in eastern Sri Lanka, Samarasinghe said.
He said the army's bomb disposal unit was called in to defuse the lethal device that fires hundreds of steel balls and can be triggered by remote control.
This particular type of explosive is a favorite weapon of separatist Tamil Tigers in their fight against security forces.
There was no immediate comment from the rebels on the explosions, but the group later accused the military of trying to destroy a bridge connecting a rebel-held village in the east with the rest of the island.
"This bridge is an essential part of the A-15 highway [leading] to Vaharai, the only highway to the 36,000 besieged people in Vaharai," the rebels said in an e-mail.
"It is therefore a humanitarian link that is now being attacked by the Sri Lankan military with the intention of destroying it," the rebels said, adding that the shelling had started yesterday morning.
Some 36,000 people, mostly ethnic Tamils, have been trapped in the village since fighting intensified last month.
Aid agencies have said that civilians are increasingly being caught up in Sri Lanka's escalating conflict and have warned that access to them has become very limited.
The military was not immediately available for comment, as top officials were in a meeting, officials said.
Since last December, airstrikes, mine attacks, assassinations and regular exchanges of heavy arms fire have killed more than 3,200 fighters and civilians in the troubled country.
Both sides insist they have not withdrawn from a 2002 truce brokered by Norway that halted two-decades of civil war.
With peace talks stalled, the government and the rebels refuse to budge from their positions.
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
At first, Francis Ari Sture thought a human was trying to shove him down the steep Norwegian mountainside. Then he saw the golden eagle land. “We are staring at each other for, maybe, a whole minute,” Sture said on Monday. “I’m trying to think what’s in its mind.” The bird then attacked Sture five more times on Thursday last week, scratching and clawing the 31-year-old bicycle courier’s face and arms over 10 to 15 minutes as he sprinted down the mountain. The same eagle is believed to be responsible for attacks on three other people across a vast mountainous area of southern Norway
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
RSS