Sri Lanka rebels say army shells kill 3 in east
Source: Reuters
(Repeats to fix headline tag) (Updates with Tiger, military, UN comment)
By Simon Gardner
COLOMBO, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Sri Lankan army shells hit a hospital complex in the island's restive northeast district of Trincomalee killing three civilians and wounding 11, the Tamil Tigers said on Monday, but the military denied it had fired.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam said shells had fallen in the town of Vakarai, which lies in a pocket of rebel-held coastal territory around 150 miles (240 km) northeast of Colombo -- which the army has surrounded and vowed to take control of.
"These people were sheltering in the hospital because they thought they would be safe under international law," Tiger military spokesman Rasiah Ilanthiraiyan said by telephone from the rebels' northern stronghold.
"The shells have hit the complex -- one was a cluster bomb -- and killed three people," he added.
Ilanthiraiyan said volunteers had set sail in a civilian boat to ferry five seriously wounded to a government hospital in the town of Batticaloa further south along the coast.
Neither aid organisations nor Nordic truce monitors have access to the Vakarai area, where an estimated 15,000 displaced ethnic Tamils are stranded in camps, and it was not immediately possible to independently confirm the casualties.
The military angrily denied hitting the hospital.
"We have not fired at the hospital premises in Vakarai today," military spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe said. "We only have multibarrel rockets and artillery. We don't have any cluster bombs."
Samarasinghe said Special Task Force elite police commandos had overrun a Tiger base further south in the district of Ampara in a separate incident and seized a large cache of weapons.
The shelling came hours after the military said suspected Tigers blew up an electricity transformer 6 miles (10 km) north of the capital Colombo early on Monday, disrupting power supplies and damaging 10 homes but causing no casualties.
That blast in turn comes after two deadly suspected Tiger bomb attacks on passenger buses last week killed 17 civilians and wounded over 100.
The Colombo stock exchange <.CSE> fell 0.72 percent on Monday as the bus blasts prompted some foreign investors to sell shares.
More than 3,000 troops, civilians and rebel fighters were killed in a spree of ambushes, suicide bombings, air raids, naval clashes and land battles last year despite a 2002 ceasefire that now exists only on paper.
The United Nations called on both sides to halt the killing and allow those civilians who have not yet managed to flee Vakarai to reach safety.
"These persons are the most vulnerable of the vulnerable," said Amin Awad, acting UN resident representative and Humanitarian Coordinator. "They are still without access to food, emergency medical services, and shelter, and continue to be caught in the middle of relentless fighting."
Analysts fear that rebel attacks, largely confined to military and political targets during this new phase in the two-decade civil war, may now increasingly focus on civilian targets as in earlier stages of a conflict that has killed more than 67,000 people since 1983.
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