Sri Lanka: Politician shot at midnight Mass

Unidentified gunmen shot and killed a pro-rebel legislator as he attended midnight Mass at a church in eastern Sri Lanka, the Defence Ministry said today, sparking fears of a return to civil war in the island nation.

The attackers fired at Joseph Pararajasingham, 71, during the Christmas service at St. Michael’s Church in Batticaloa, the site of frequent skirmishes between rebel factions, military spokesman Brig. Prasad Samarasinghe said.

Pararajasingham’s wife, Sugunam, and eight others, were wounded in the shooting and were being treated in local hospitals.

Pararajasingham’s bodyguards returned fire, but the assailants escaped.

The government has blamed the Tamil Tigers for the attack.

“It appears that the (Tamil Tigers) were desperately trying to divert the attention elsewhere and create mayhem and havoc while eschewing political discussions” to end the civil war, the government said in a statement.

The statement said Pararajasingham had no plans to attend the mass but that a telephone caller “had insisted” that he be present at the late night service.

A police officer in Batticaloa, eastern Sri Lanka’s main town, said the lawmaker died instantly after two assailants fired four shots into his chest.

Pararajasingham represented the Tamil National Alliance, a proxy party of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which has been fighting the government for two decades for a Tamil homeland for Sri Lanka’s 3.2 million ethnic Tamil minority.

A pro-rebel web site reported the incident without comment. There was no claim of responsibility, but a breakaway faction of the rebels is known to oppose the Alliance.

Batticaloa was the scene of several bloody battles between the rebels after a powerful eastern commander and his followers split from the main insurgency group last year.

The uprising was ruthlessly suppressed by the main rebel group, but sympathy for the breakaway leader – known as Karuna – remains strong among Tamils in the east.

The Tigers also accuse the Sri Lankan military of backing Karuna’s faction, an accusation the military denies.

The killing drew sharp reaction from the Tamil National Alliance, which accused the government of having a hand in the assassination.

Targeting key Tamil political actors to weaken the rebel cause is a strategy “adopted by the Sri Lankan state,” S. Jeyananthamoorthy, an Alliance lawmaker, was quoted as saying by the pro-rebel web site, TamilNet.

The shooting came as envoys from Japan, Britain, Norway and the European Union - key backers of Sri Lanka’s peace process – met the rebels’ political leader, S. P. Thamilselvan, on Saturday in the northern guerrilla stronghold of Kilinochchi to raise concerns about the growing violence.

Violence has also escalated in Sri Lanka’s ethnic Tamil-majority north and parts of the east since mainstream rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran threatened to resume his struggle for an independent Tamil homeland if the government fails to address Tamils’ grievances.

The Tamil Tigers started fighting in 1983 for a separate Tamil homeland in the island nation’s north and east, claiming discrimination by the majority Sinhalese.