SRI LANKA: A Tamil Tiger suicide bomber rammed an explosive-laden truck into a Sri Lankan naval convoy yesterday, killing at least 99 sailors and wounding over 150 others.
Officials said it was one the worst such attacks on the island republic, wracked by civil war for nearly two decades, and one likely to affect the imminent peace talks in Switzerland between the warring Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the government.
An eyewitness said several of the buses attacked by the suicide bomber near the town of Habarana, 190 km northeast of the capital, Colombo, were destroyed. He said the mangled body of the suicide bomber was found about 50 metres from the bombing spot.
"All these people (victims) were without weapons and were going home on leave," Sri Lanka's military spokesman, Brig Prasad Samarasinghe, declared. He warned that fatalities could rise, as the blast site was littered with body parts and a count of survivors was in progress.
The strike came at the start of a week of hectic international diplomacy, led by Japan and Norway, aimed at ending the clashes between the two sides, which have been going on for almost a year ahead of planned peace talks in Geneva later this month.
"There were about 15 buses in the convoy and 13 were damaged in the explosion," a navy officer in Colombo declared. He said many sailors had stepped out after the buses stopped near the naval transit camp at Habarana when the bomb-laden truck rammed into the nearby stationary vehicles.
"When the LTTE can't fight the navy at sea, they resort to these types of attacks," the military spokesman stated.
"This inhuman act is a clear revenge by the terrorists on the navy, who inflicted successive defeats for LTTE against their attempts of smuggling arms and explosives," he added.
Over the years, the LTTE has earned notoriety for executing dramatic strikes, including suicide attacks guaranteed to grab headlines around the world.
Yesterday's attack took place as Japan's Yasushi Akashi, the peace envoy of the island's chief financial donor nation, began talks with government leaders to push forward a four-year peace process that now exists only on paper, having been battered by mounting violence in which over 2,000 people had died since last December.
The Tigers have been fighting since 1983 for a separate homeland for the Tamil minority in northern and eastern Sri Lanka, citing decades of discrimination by the majority Sinhalese. Over 65,000 people had died in the violence before the 2002 ceasefire.
Thorfinnur Omarsson, a spokesman for the Sri Lanka monitoring mission, urged the government and rebels to maintain their commitment to the peace talks.
The flurry of diplomatic activity follows some of the bloodiest fighting since the 2002 cease-fire on the northern Jaffna peninsula, which has left hundreds of combatants dead.
The military controls the Jaffna peninsula, which the ethnic Tamil minority claims as its cultural heartland. But the LTTE has seized small pockets there similar to other portions it controls in eastern Sri Lanka, running a parallel administration in these "liberated" regions.