SRI LANKA:Suspected Tamil Tiger rebels killed a Sri Lankan minister with a roadside bomb north of the capital yesterday, officials said, the second member of parliament killed in a week as a protracted civil war escalates.
Nation building minister DM Dassanayake, whose vehicle was hit by the blast in the town of Ja-Ela, 19km (12 miles) north of Colombo on the road to the island's only international airport, died on the operating table.
One of his security detail, who was one of 10 others wounded, also later died, hospital and government officials said.
Local television broadcast footage of the minister's Toyota Land Cruiser, its windows shattered and sides peppered with shrapnel sprayed by the Claymore fragmentation mine.
The bombing is the latest in a series of attacks on government officials and the military in recent months. It comes just days after the government said it was formally scrapping a tattered ceasefire which had degenerated into renewed civil war in early 2006.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who want to carve out an independent state in north and east Sri Lanka, were not immediately available for comment, but routinely deny involvement in such attacks.
"The assassination of minister DM Dassanayake deserves the most vehement and unequivocal condemnation by all those who respect democracy, desire peace and value human life," Sir Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa said.
"His assassination should be a further call for unity by all who stand for freedom and democracy to come together, shedding petty political or other differences, to decidedly defeat terrorism in our country," he added.
A second explosion shook the capital yesterday evening, when a bomb planted in a phone booth at an apartment block on a roundabout near the Hilton hotel in the city's business district detonated. There were no reports of any casualties.
Fighting continued elsewhere yesterday. Fighter jets raided a suspected rebel command post in the northwestern district of Mannar, and the military said troops had killed 13 rebels in a series of clashes in the north and northeast. - (Reuters)