Nine die in fighting as Tigers split

Tamil Tiger guerrillas advanced on a heavily armed breakaway faction today in a vicious gun and mortar battle that killed at least nine people, wounded 20 and imperilled Sri Lanka’s fragile two-year-old cease-fire.

It was the worst armed clash since the 2002 truce halted a longrunning civil war and came just a week after voters replaced a government that had negotiated the end to fighting with a parliamentary alliance that backs the country’s hardline president.

After the battle along the Vergual River, 140 miles east of the capital, Colombo, about 500 heavily armed fighters from the breakaway group withdrew from the area claiming they were repositioning not retreating.

“About 1,000 … people came and attacked us, so this is a tactical withdrawal and we are going to set up our new defence line,” S. Kumar, a senior commander of the breakaway group, said.

The breakway fighters, including 100 women, moved ammunition, rocket launchers, grenades and heavy-machine guns to a new camp.

For two decades the Liberation Tigers of Tamileelam fought government troops in a bloody separatist conflict that claimed an estimated 65,000 lives.

Now the once close-knit group, infamous for its ruthless tactics including suicide bombings, is split in two and fighting within its own ranks, leaving at least eight guerrillas and one civilian dead.

Thousands of terrified villagers have fled their homes.

Norwegian monitors said the reported civilian death and the wounding of seven others was already a breach of the cease-fire.

Amid fears that the fragile peace process could be doomed if government troops were drawn into the fighting, President Chandrika Kumaratunga ordered her commanders to help evacuate rebel casualties from both sides, but not to interfere in their conflict, an official said.

The army positioned men along the sea cliff to prevent any guerrilla assault on a school at Panichachankani, where some 2,600 families were being cared for by the international relief organisations UNICEF and OXFAM.

“We don’t want to get dragged into this,” Defence Secretary Ciril Herath said after an emergency meeting with European cease-fire-monitors in Colombo. “We are watching the situation very closely.”

The TamilNet Web site, which supports the main rebel group, said more than 300 breakaway guerrillas had surrendered on the southern side of the river, but that was not confirmed.