A senior government security official was killed in a claymore
mine explosion in the early hours of Monday in central Sri Lanka as
fighting continued in the eastern province, defense officials
said.
Senior Superintendent of Police, Upul Seneviratne, the Training
and the Operations Director of the police's elite Special Task
Force (STF) was blown up near his home at Digana in the Central
Kandy district at around 4:45 AM local time (23:45 GMT) as he was
being driven away to capital Colombo.
A claymore mine blamed on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
(LTTE) rebels is the cause for the accident in which his driver was
also seriously hurt, the National Security Media Center here
said.
Seneviratne, a key member of the STF, was the most senior STF
officer to have been killed since the February 2002 ceasefire.
The defense officials said that the military was keeping its
advance to the sluice gate closed down by the Tigers after a
Norwegian brokered deal failed to materialize on Sunday.
The LTTE with the Norwegian special envoy Jon Hanssen-Bauer
agreed to open the sluice gate closed down since July 20 at 4 PM
local time on Sunday only to be told by the government that they
would not agree to the conditions attached by the rebels to the
opening of the gate which provides water to some 15,000 families
and 30,000 acres in the eastern province's Trincomalee
district.
Meanwhile a French aid agency said Monday that it was to lodge
complain with the government over a gunning down of 15 of its local
employees on Sunday at its office in the troubled town of
Muttur.
Who had done the killing is yet to be established.
The LTTE has blamed the security forces for the killing which
had taken place after people, mostly Muslims, fled Muttur on
Friday.
The LTTE last Wednesday launched a mortar and artillery attack
on the Muslim dominated town and appeared to be in control of at
least some parts of the town until the government's elite troops
managed to wrest back total control.
(Xinhua News Agency August 7, 2006)
