Sri Lanka president's brother escapes bomb blast
Source: Reuters
(Updates with truce monitor comment) By Ranga Sirilal COLOMBO, Dec 1 (Reuters) - Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse's brother, who is also the island's defence secretary, narrowly escaped a suspected suicide bomb attack in the capital on Friday, officials said. Two security force personnel were killed by the blast in central Colombo and 12 people were wounded, officials said. The president's office said Gothabaya Rajapakse was unhurt. It blamed the attack on a Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) suicide bomber. "After the explosion, he directly came to the president's office and hugged him," said Sudath Silva, President Rajapakse's official photographer. "The blood on his clothes was that of his security guards." In a separate incident, residents said two soldiers had been killed in an anti-personnel mine blast outside the main hospital in the army-held Jaffna peninsula, which is cut off from the rest of the island by rebel lines. The attacks come just days after the Tigers' shadowy leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, said the group was resuming its independence struggle, which analysts said meant that a new chapter in the two-decade civil war was likely to escalate. The Tigers denied involvement in the Colombo bombing, but few believed their routine denials. Nordic truce monitors said the attack pointed to the rebels. "The blast bears the hallmarks of methods used by the LTTE in the past," the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) said in a statement. "The SLMM urges the parties to respect the Cease Fire Agreement and to give up violence." SUICIDE BOMBER DECAPITATED? A Reuters witness saw a headless body in the back of a civilian pick-up truck at the scene of the blast and the wreckage of a three-wheeler taxi -- vehicles which have been used in previous bomb attacks blamed on the rebels. "That's the remains of the suicide bomber," said military spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe. Two cars and a motorcycle caught in the blast lay on the road in flames. The government published photographs of the clearly relieved Rajapakse brothers hugging. "Through the blessings of good fortune, the LTTE terrorists failed in their attempt to take my life today," the defence secretary said in a statement. "I am not ready to abandon the responsibility we have towards the country in the face of such cowardly acts by the LTTE and ... reaffirm our commitment to the national need to defeat the LTTE's terrorism." The attack took place outside an up-market Indian restaurant in central Colombo, a few hundred metres from the prime minister's offices. Sri Lanka's civil war has killed more than 67,000 civilians, troops and rebel fighters since 1983, some 3,000 this year alone.
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