Unidentified gunmen yesterday stormed the home of a Tamil parliamentary candidate who was allied to a renegade rebel leader, killing him and one of his relatives, police said.
Another relative was seriously wounded in the attack in the eastern town of Batticaloa, police spokesman Rienzie Perera said.
Rajan Sathiyamoorthy of the Tamil National Alliance was shot at point-blank range and declared dead after he was taken to a hospital, Perera said.
Supporters of the Tamil Tiger rebel movement are running as candidates of the mainstream Tamil National Alliance. Party leaders could become kingmakers after Friday's vote if the results -- as expected -- do not conclusively favor either of the country's two main political blocs.
However, the Tamil alliance has been in crisis since a split in rebel ranks in early March. A powerful Tiger leader broke away from the main guerrilla group with about 40 percent of its fighting force.
A policeman in Batticaloa said on condition of anonymity that Sathiyamoorthy was a staunch supporter of the breakaway leader, Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan.
Seven of the eight Tamil National Alliance candidates running in Batticaloa are believed to support Muralitharan. Many of them have complained of anonymous telephone threats urging them to withdraw from the election, the policeman said. The pro-Tiger TamilNet Web site referred to Sathiyamoorthy as a "close confidante" of Muralitharan.
The incident took place just four days after the Tamil Tigers warned Muralitharan's cadre and supporters to "keep away from him." Muralitharan has been expelled from the Tiger group and branded a traitor.
The rebel split, which has raised fears of renewed fighting that could draw in the Sri Lankan army, comes on top of a power struggle between the country's president and prime minister that has prompted Friday's election.
Political violence has spiked in recent days in Sri Lanka, though it remains far beneath the country's last election, in 2001, when dozens of people were killed in political attacks.
Yesterday's shooting was the third in three days, and the second in that area. It took place amid heightened police and army presence in Batticaloa, about 220km east of the capital, Colombo.
"Police have been put on red alert," said Colonel Sumeda Perera, a military spokesman, with roadblocks and spot checks increased in the region.
The Tigers are suspects in at least one other shooting, of a university professor believed to support the dissident rebel leader. No arrests had been made so far.
On Monday, Muralitharan's spokesman, Varathan, blamed the Tigers' northern-based leadership for the professor's shooting and one other attempted murder, and predicted more such violence.
The killings took place hours before campaigning for the decisive poll drew to a close.
The April 2 election is being fought mainly on the issue of who can best lead the government's peace negotiations: President Chandrika Kumaratunga or her rival, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS