Rising Sri Lanka violence leaves at least 4 dead

SERUNUWARA, Sri Lanka, Apr 21 (Reuters) Ethnic clashes today rocked Sri Lanka's northeast after mine attacks blamed on the Tamil Tiger rebels killed at least three in a wave of violence that has raised fears of a return to civil war.

The unrest near the city of Trincomalee came a day after the Tigers said they were indefinitely postponing talks with the government initially set for next week, despite the efforts of a Norwegian peace envoy.

A claymore mine explosion in the early morning killed one police guard and wounded another. A second claymore blast in the same area a few hours later killed two soldiers and wounded two, the army and local police said. In the late afternoon, a civilian bus was caught in another blast, wounding the driver.

The attacks sparked angry Sinhalese residents to set upon nearby Tamil settlements in riots that killed at least one and damaged several houses.

''Things are going from bad to worse,'' said A J Jayawardena, the local division secretary in Serunuwara, south of Trincomalee.

The government and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) signed a ceasefire in 2002 after two decades of civil war, but nearly 90 people have been killed in the past two weeks and many fear the island could be heading back to a full-scale conflict.

At the hospital in the multi-ethnic town of Serunuwara, Sinhalese residents created an uproar shortly after the bodies of the two dead were brought by ambulance, Reuters witnesses said.

Many Tamils in the area had fled to a nearby school, but the situation was now calm and the area under curfew.

The government said the Tigers were deliberately stirring up ethnic tensions.

''Provocations of this nature can only have one result -- setting one community against another,'' said Palitha Kohona, who head the government's body for co-ordinating the peace process.

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