Sri LankaÂ’s military said it targeted senior Tamil rebel leaders Thursday with an airstrike in the north, but it was not immediately clear if there were any casualties, military officials said.
The rebels claimed the attack hit a civilian area. Government ground troops, meanwhile, attacked insurgentsÂ’ mortar positions in the northwest following a day of fierce fighting that left 23 combatants dead. Air force fighter jets bombed a location in the northern town of Kilinochchi following intelligence reports that senior leaders of the Tamil Tiger rebels were meeting there, said air force spokesman Group Capt Ajantha Silva.
It was not clear who was hurt in the strike, but “the place was destroyed,” Silva said. But rebel spokesman Daya Master denied the military’s claim, saying the air force had bombed an area populated by civilians, and that two were wounded. “We don’t have camps in that area and none of our leaders were wounded,” Master said by telephone from the rebel stronghold of Kilinochchi. There was no way to independently verify the claims of either side. In northwestern Sri Lanka, soldiers tried to knock out rebel mortar positions bordering the island’s northwestern Mannar and Vavuniya districts, from where the Tamil Tiger insurgents have often launched attacks on military defence lines, said military spokesman Brig Prasad Samarasinghe.
Rebel satellite: The US-based Intelsat has shut down the radio and television broadcasts of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels, the Sri Lankan government said in a statement here Thursday. Intelsat, the world’s largest commercial satellite communications provider, has told Colombo’s mission in Washington that the service of the Tigers was shut down over the weekend. “Intelsat has terminated the ‘unauthorised’ use of one of its satellites, Intelsat12, by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) for its TV and radio transmissions to Europe and Asia,” the government statement said. |