By IANS
Colombo : One person was killed and four others, including three school children, were injured in a bomb blast in south Colombo Monday morning, the Sri Lankan Army spokesman said.
“The bomb was kept in a flower pot in the middle of Galle Road opposite Roxy cinema at Wellawatte,” military spokesman Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara told IANS.
Reports said the bomb was a claymore mine used mainly by the Tamil rebel group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
The blast occurred at about 6.45 a.m. when children are headed for schools. General traffic on the arterial Galle Road picks up a little later, around 8 a.m.
The site of the blast was strewn with torn schoolbooks and bags. The charred body of the dead civilian, shorn of his clothes, was lying right in the middle of the road before the police took it away.
The area was immediately cordoned off and traffic was diverted.
It was not clear as to who could have been the intended target of the attack. Wellwatte is a predominantly Tamil area with a particular concentration of Tamils from the island’s war-torn Tamil-speaking northeastern districts. The Roxy cinema specializes in showing Tamil films.
Colombo has been seeing a series of blasts allegedly perpetrated by the LTTE in retaliation for the successful Sri Lankan military operations in the rebel-held parts of the island’s north.
Political observers said the blast could be a retaliation for the killing of a pro-LTTE Tamil member of parliament, K. Sivanesan, in a claymore mine blast in a rebel controlled area in Wanni in north Sri Lanka on March 6. The LTTE accused the Sri Lankan Army’s deep penetration unit of killing the parliamentarian.