S Lanka Air Force bombs Tigers, 6 rebels killed

COLOMBO, July 27: Sri Lanka's air force bombed a suspected Tamil Tiger air strip and targets in the island's northeast today; a second day of air raids the rebels said killed six of their fighters and wounded five civilians.

Kfir fighter jets raided the northern district of Mullaithivu, where the Tiger navy wing is based, after a suspected runway was spotted. The warplanes also bombed rebel land near a reservoir at the centre of a water supply spat.

The government accuses the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of choking the flow of water to farmland in the eastern district of Trincomalee, where the government and rebels both control territory.

The Tigers say Tamil civilians closed reservoir sluices to demand the government build water towers in Tamil areas.

''To achieve the target of distributing water, the government and the defence authorities will do everything possible,'' defence spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella told Reuters.

But a plan for a ground troop incursion into the area had not materialised by evening, the military said.

Both the government and the Tigers claim control over the reservoir, which lies in an area where the frontline between the foes is ill-defined. But on the ground, it is the Tigers which control the area, military sources said.

''We don't see any logic for this kind of aerial bombardment,'' Tiger military spokesman Ilanthiraiyan said by telephone from the northern rebel stronghold of Kilinochchi. ''It is an act of war.'' The aerial bombardment came as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres visited the island to assess the plight of hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans displaced by a two-decade civil war.

WAR FEARS

The bombing raid is the latest in a series of attacks and clashes between the military and the LTTE that many fear could rupture a 2002 ceasefire and reignite a war that has killed more than 65,000 people since 1983. More than 800 people hae been killed in this year alone, and with the government diametrically opposed to Tiger demands for a separate ethnic homeland in the north and east, some fear it could take years before a final peace deal is clinched.

Sporadic attacks continued toda. A civilian was shot dead in the northern Jaffna peninsula, while a soldier and two other civilians were injured when a Claymore fragmentation mine exploded near a Hindu college in the district.

Yesterday's airstrikes in Trincomalee came just hours after UNHCR's Guterres visited the district.

''This is a very complex situation. The risk is that an incident is followed by another and there is anescalation,'' Guterres told a news conference in Colombo today. ''Restraint is essential to avoid any kind of escalation.'' The UNHCR estimates there are 315,000 long-term internally displaced people in Sri Lanka due to the protracted conflict, 67,000 of whom live in camps and around 247,000 of whom live with relatives and friends. There are another 125,000 Sri Lankan refugees abroad, 68,000 of them in neighbouring India.

REUTERS