By P.K. Balachandran, IANS
Colombo : Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa has warned that the LTTE will be banned if it continues to stage terrorist attacks.
“If one or two more incidents of the kind that took place on Nov 28 happen, we will have no option. We will have to ban,” Rajapaksa told foreign correspondents at a Christmas party at his residence Monday.
“There is a limit to our patience, our tolerance,” he said.
The president was alluding to the parcel bomb attack on Nov 28 at a popular shopping complex at Nugegoda in the outskirts of Colombo, in which at least 20 people, including school children, were killed.
Sounding self-assured, Rajapaksa said that while peace was his aim, the LTTE had to be defeated first.
“There can be no peace until the LTTE is defeated militarily,” he asserted.
The president refused to answer questions on the visit of an Indian defence delegation to Sri Lanka which began on Monday. India supplies defensive equipment like radars, and trains Sri Lankan military personnel.
Asked to confirm a report that LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran was injured in a Sri Lankan Air Force (SLAF) raid in November, the Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa said that on Nov 28, the SLAF had struck two “high profile” targets in the Wanni region, where Prabhakaran was, but added that details of the occupants of the buildings and the damage done were not available.
“What we do know is that one of the targets was closed down for two weeks,” he added.
The Nation weekly had reported Sunday that Prabhakaran was slightly injured in an air raid and that he was treated at a facility in Wanni.
Speculation is rife in Colombo about the incident because the LTTE has remained silent despite the coverage that the incident got in the international media.