By P.K. Balachandran, IANS
Colombo : Within hours of the Sri Lankan government’s announcement that it had decided to abrogate the ceasefire agreement with the Tamil Tigers, two soldiers were killed Thursday when their vehicle ran over a pressure mine.
The incident took place in Kebetigollewa in north central Sri Lanka, an army spokesperson told IANS.
Kebetigollewa had been the site of two claymore mine attacks earlier. The blast in 2006 claimed the lives of 64 civilian bus passengers and the one in 2007 took the lives of 15 bus passengers, again all civilians.
The Sri Lankan government had Wednesday decided to withdraw from the Norway-brokered 2002 ceasefire agreement it had signed with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) citing its failure to bring peace to the country.
The cabinet had taken a “policy decision to annul and abrogate the agreement as it was a mere scrap of paper and had failed to bring peace to the country”, government spokesperson Keheliya Rambukwella had said.
The cabinet paper for the abrogation of the pact was presented by Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickramanayake and was accepted unanimously, Rambukwella added.