By P.K. Balachandran, IANS
Colombo : T. Maheswaran, an outspoken Tamil member of the Sri Lankan parliament, was shot dead along with a bodyguard when he was praying at a Hindu temple here to usher in the New Year.
One or more gunmen, armed with automatic weapons, fired at the unsuspecting politician, his entourage and also other worshipers at about 10 a.m. One of his five bodyguards was killed and 12 people were injured.
The bleeding MP, from the opposition United National Party (UNP), was rushed to the Colombo National Hospital in critical condition. But frantic efforts to save him failed, said Hector Weerasinghe, the hospital director.
Being New Year’s day, the Ponnambala Vaneswara temple, dedicated to Lord Siva, was crowded with worshippers when terror struck.
It was not clear if Maheswaran’s family was among the worshippers. Panic enveloped the temple and its environs after the shooting.
A leading military expert who did not want to be identified said the assassination had serious security implications because the temple was located outside the Colombo harbour, a high security area.
“If the Tamil Tigers have done it, it is cause of more worry because it shows they are prowling in the city in a high security zone,” the expert said.
The government and the police refused to blame anyone for the assassination. In normal circumstances, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) gets blamed quickly for any major act of violence in Sri Lanka.
Maheswaran had been facing threats from all sides, a political source explained. He had a controversial career as a politician and businessman in Colombo and in Jaffna when the LTTE held sway over the northern Tamil-speaking district.
A leading Colombo-based trader and also a former minister, Maheswaran had represented Colombo and Jaffna districts in parliament in his long career in politics.
In recent times, he had threatened to expose people behind a string of killings, abductions and extortions in Jaffna.
He had told a private TV channel recently that he would come out with an expose in parliament when it meets Jan 8.
Maheswaran had also complained that the government had reduced his police security drastically in the middle of December, leaving just two constables to protect him.
He said he had to employ private security guards at a very high cost.
UNP spokesman Tissa Attanayake blamed the government for the tragedy.
“The government had pruned his security in order to kill him,” the web edition of the Daily Mirror newspaper quoted Attanayake as saying.
Leading Tamil newspaper editor N. Vithiatharan told IANS that the international community needed to put pressure on the government to restore state security to political leaders.
The government had drastically cut security cover provided to former ministers Anura Bandaranaike and Rauff Hakeem as well as Tamil MP Mano Ganesan.
The withdrawals allegedly followed the crossover of Bandaranaike and Hakeem to the opposition ranks and after Ganesan was chosen the first runner up for this year’s Freedom Defenders Award given by the US government.
Bandaranaike, a brother of former president Chandrika Kumaratunga, had said that the government had thrown opened “the front gate to (LTTE chief Velupillai) Pranbhakaran’s assassins” to kill politicians like him.
Ganesan announced that it would not be possible to live in Sri Lanka given the threats to his security. He said he was going to go abroad.