Bomb Kills Sri Lankan Minister

A Sri Lankan government minister was killed Tuesday in a roadside bombing near the capital being blamed on Tamil Tiger rebels, the military said. The blast killed another person and wounded 10.
D.M. Dassanayake, who held the position of nation-building minister but was not a member of the Cabinet, died in a hospital after his car was caught in the explosion in the Ja-Ela area, about 12 miles north of Colombo, military spokesman Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara said.
“We have still not arrested anybody but the suspicion is on the LTTE,” Nanayakkara said, referring to the rebels by the initials of their movement’s formal name, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
Rebel spokesman Rasiah Ilanthirayan did not answer calls for comment.
The killing, which came days after the government officially pulled out of a cease-fire with the rebels, appeared certain to intensify an already raging civil war along front lines between the government-controlled south and the insurgents’ de facto state in the north.
“The minister was critically injured and was in a very serious condition even when he was brought here so the doctors immediately took him for an operation but unfortunately he died,” said Dr. Dharmawardena Guruge, a physician at the hospital where Dassanayake was taken.
“He had injuries all over the body and there were head injuries,” he said.
One other man was also killed, Guruge told an AP photographer, and the blast wounded another 10.
Tamil Tiger rebels often target top political or military officials.
In April 2006, a female suicide bomber failed to kill Army Commander Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka, who was critically wounded but resumed work after treatment. The following December, Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa escaped a bomb attack without injuries.
The last successful assassination was in June 2006, when the rebels killed Maj. Gen. Parami Kulatunga, the third highest-ranking military officer, in a bomb attack.
The rebels have been blamed for an increase in the number of attacks in the Colombo area in recent months. Last Wednesday, rebels were accused of planting a bomb that exploded near a bus transporting wounded soldiers through the heart of the capital. The blast killed four people - a soldier and three civilian bystanders.
Soon after, Sri Lanka’s Cabinet officially withdrew from a 2002 truce that had all but collapsed over the past two years as escalating violence killed some 5,000 people.
In the days since, a new wave of violence across the main battle zone in the north killed 85 people - 81 rebels and four soldiers - according to the military.
It was not possible to independently verify the military’s claims because the fighting took place deep in the jungles of the north, where access is restricted. Both sides often inflate casualty figures for their opponent, while underestimating their own.
More than 70,000 people have been killed since the rebels began fighting in 1983 for an independent state for the ethnic Tamil minority, claiming discrimination by the Sinhalese majority.