Government troops and separatist Tamil Tiger rebels clashed in two separate battles in northern Sri Lanka leaving four combatants dead, the military said yesterday.
The fighting broke out on Saturday night in Vavuniya district, a frontier between government-controlled and rebel-held areas in Sri Lanka's north, said an officer at the Defense Ministry's media center.
A group of Tamil Tigers attacked an army patrol in Thampane, setting off a gunbattle that killed two insurgents, said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity citing policy. One soldier was killed and eight others were wounded.
Separately, soldiers shot and killed a rebel who attacked troops guarding the northern defense line that separates government and rebel-controlled areas. The army sustained no casualties, the officer said.
No independent confirmation of the military's claims was available. Rebel spokesman Rasiah Ilanthirayan could not immediately be reached for comment yesterday.
Both sides routinely exaggerate enemy casualty figures while underplaying their own.
Vavuniya -- about 210km north of the capital Colombo -- has become a flashpoint in Sri Lanka's escalating conflict.
In July the government seized full control of Sri Lanka's Eastern Province from the Tigers after 13 years. But the guerrillas still hold a vast area in the north where they run a de facto state.
Sri Lanka's civil war began in 1983 when ethnic minority Tamils fed up with discrimination at the hands of the Sinhalese-dominated government launched a violent campaign for a separate state.
A brief lull in fighting occurred after a Norwegian-brokered ceasefire in 2002, but a wave of assassinations, ground operations and airstrikes over the past 22 months have killed more than 5,000 people.
The Bolivian government on Friday struck a deal with protesting miners, but was still grappling with blockades and demonstrations by other workers across La Paz. Other groups are still blocking access roads into the city, which is also the seat of the government. Police on Thursday prevented the miners from entering the main square by using tear gas, while the demonstrators hurled stones and explosives with slingshots. Protests against the policies of Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz have convulsed the Andean nation since early this month, and roadblocks were choking routes into La Paz throughout Friday, the national road authority said. Miners demanded that Paz
The Philippines said it has asked the country’s Supreme Court to allow it to arrest former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s chief drug war enforcer to stand trial in an international tribunal. The International Criminal Court (ICC) last week unsealed an arrest warrant against Philippine Senator Ronald dela Rosa, accusing him along with Duterte and other “coperpetrators” of the “crime against humanity of murder.” Dela Rosa briefly sought refuge in the Philippine Senate last week while asking the Philippine Supreme Court to stop an ongoing attempt by government agents to arrest him. “By his own conduct, he has placed himself outside the protection of
A ship anchored off the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was seized and taken toward Iran and another — a cargo ship near Oman — sank after being attacked, authorities said on Thursday, as tensions escalated near the Strait of Hormuz. It was not immediately clear who was behind these incidents, but they happened as a senior Iranian official reiterated his country’s claim of control over the waterway and another said it had a right to seize oil tankers connected to the US. The turmoil in the strait has been a sticking point for weeks in talks between the US and Iran to
The researchers in Ireland looked at their computer screen, marveling at a medieval book tracked down in a Roman library. They flipped through its digitized pages and found their sought-after treasure: the oldest surviving English poem. “We were extremely surprised. We were speechless. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw that,” said Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin’s school of English. The poem was also within the main body of Latin text, she said, calling it “extraordinary.” Composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century, Caedmon’s Hymn appears within some copies of
RSS