By P.K. Balachandran, IANS
Colombo : Sri Lanka Wednesday denied responsibility for a bus blast in the island’s rebel-held north that killed 18 civilians including 12 children. But the Tamil Tigers have told the UN that the army committed the outrage.
“The blast took place in an area controlled by the LTTE terrorists. Our troops do not operate there,” the government’s defence spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella said here.
He told newspersons that the blast occurred near St. Mary’s Church in Madu, an area he said the Sri Lankan forces had been treating as “sacred” and as a “no-war zone” at the request of the Bishop of Mannar.
“We have stuck to this assurance despite the fact that the LTTE has been moving in the Madu area freely, regardless of its sanctity,” Rambukwella said.
A claymore mine targeted a school bus plying on the Madu-Palampiddy Road Tuesday.
In a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, B. Nadesan, head of the political wing of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), said the army’s Deep Penetration Unit had “deliberately” targeted the school bus.
Sri Lanka rejected this allegation.
“We have been bombing only chosen military targets, scrupulously avoiding civilian areas. It is the LTTE that has been killing innocent civilians in the south (of Sri Lanka) by bombing buses and shooting the survivors. They have even hacked poor farmers with knives,” an official of the Media Centre for National Security told IANS.
The areas where the bus got bombed is part of a large area in Sri Lanka’s north that the LTTE controls.
Fighting in recent times between the LTTE and the military has become vicious.
On Jan 4, the Sri Lanka Air Force bombed Uppukulam village in LTTE-held Mullaitivu district, injuring seven children, Nadesan said.
On Nov 27, a claymore mine attack on a van killed six children. An aerial bombardment on that day killed another three children in Kilinochchi, Nadesan added.
“Since the present president of Sri Lanka took office in November 2005, 2,056 Tamil civilians, including 132 Tamil children, have been massacred by the state forces,” he added.
He said the government had not only abrogated the truce it signed in 2002 with the LTTE but had “adamantly” refused to allow UN human rights monitoring in the war zone.
Nadesan claimed that the LTTE had cooperated with Norwegian peace brokers and declared its commitment to the truce pact “100 percent”.
“It should be obvious to the international community that there is only one path open to regain the rights of the Tamil people and that is for the international community to recognise the sovereignty of the Tamil nation,” Nadesan said.