Sri Lanka rebel clash kills 4 as UK envoy visits

Colombo, Feb 14: Three Tamil Tiger rebels and a policeman were killed in a clash in eastern Sri Lanka today, the military said, minutes before a British minister flew in to the area to visit war refugees and aid workers.

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels tried to ambush a local police post and elite Special Task Force (STF) police commandos retaliated, said military spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe.

''They have attacked a homeguard post 20 km west of Ampara town,'' Samarasinghe said. ''So far the STF have recovered three Tiger dead bodies and recovered two T-56 (assault rifles).'' The Tigers were not immediately available for comment on the clash in Ampara, a district of scrub jungle, wild elephants and paddy fields that was badly ravaged by the 2004 tsunami and where the Tigers control pockets of territory.

The incident came as British Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Dr Kim Howells flew to the area to meet with aid groups workers and camps housing war-displaced.

A British High Commission official said his trip was going ahead as planned despite the incident just a few miles away.

Howells warned on Monday that Sri Lanka's reputation was at stake if a two-decade war that has killed more than 67,000 since 1983 rumbles on, saying Britain's own experience in Northern Ireland showed there could be no military solution to the conflict.

Separately, in the besieged far northern Jaffna peninsula, troops recovered a record haul of 690 kg of C4 plastic high explosives buried under an abandoned house -- the military's biggest such find since a now tattered 2002 truce.

The Tigers resumed their fight for an independent state after President Mahinda Rajapakse flatly rejected their demands for a separate homeland for minority Tamils in the north and east, and the rebels have shunned government offers of fresh peace talks.

Emboldened by the capture of a key eastern Tiger stronghold further north on the coast, the government has vowed to go on the offensive to destroy the rebels' entire military machine in the belief it can finally win the war.

Land and naval clashes, abductions, murders, ambushes and rights violations are now commonplace and the foes have ignored repeated international community calls to halt the war, which analysts fear is set to escalate.

Reuters

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