COLOMBO, (Reuters) - Suspected Tamil Tiger rebels blew up part of a rail track, derailing a train in Sri Lanka's east on Wednesday and injuring four people, the military said, a day before Japan's peace envoy was due to visit the district.
Yasushi Akashi arrived on Tuesday for a five-day visit to try and find ways to jumpstart a battered peace process which has descended into renewed war. An estimated 4,500 people have been killed since last year alone.
Three civilians were injured aboard the train in the district of Batticaloa when two landmines planted on the track blew up and jolted the carriages, while a policeman who got off the train afterwards stepped on another mine, the military said.
"The blast has damaged the track. The train has gone off the track, but has not toppled," said military spokesman Prasad Samarasinghe. "It was definitely the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam)."
In a separate incident, a soldier was killed when suspected rebels ambushed a patrol with a Claymore mine in the northern district of Vavuniya.
The Tigers denied they were behind the train attack.
They blamed former comrades who broke away to form their own faction called the Karuna group, which is believed to be allied to the government and which has since suffered an internal split of its own.
"That area is dominated by paramilitary groups," Tiger military spokesman Rasiah Ilanthiraiyan said by telephone from the rebels' de facto capital in the far north. "We have nothing to do with that incident."
"Now there are a lot of people with dangerous ideas and dangerous weapons there following the friction within the Karuna group," he added.
Fighting between the state and separatist Tigers is now focused largely on the north after troops evicted the rebels from their eastern stronghold, but Batticaloa is still plagued by attacks and skirmishes.
The military said 61 rebels were killed in weekend fighting in the north. The rebels say they lost 8 fighters.
JAPAN PEACE EFFORT
Akashi is due to meet President Mahinda Rajapaksa, his brother -- the island's defence secretary -- and civil society leaders on Wednesday, and is scheduled to visit camps housing thousands of internally displaced in Batticaloa on Thursday.
Japan, Sri Lanka's top financial donor, has played down expectations of any breakthrough from the visit, but says he backs a drive to create a devolution proposal to end a conflict that has killed nearly 70,000 people since 1983.
Akashi's visit to the east will also coincide with the funeral of two Tamil volunteers of the Sri Lanka Red Cross, who were taken away by men who identified themselves as policemen from a train station in Colombo on Friday. Their corpses were found dumped outside the capital two days later.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon voiced concern for the safety of aid workers in Sri Lanka in the wake of the killings, in which the police deny any involvement.
Rajapaksa met Red Cross officials on Tuesday.
"(Rajapaksa) gave an ultimatum to the police to somehow solve this within one week and if they failed, he will get external help maybe from India or Scotland Yard," said Neville Nanayakkara, director-general of the Sri Lanka Red Cross.
No comments:
Post a Comment