Aid group finds bodies of two workers in Sri Lanka

An international aid group said today it found the bodies of two more of its workers after discovering 15 others killed last week in Sri Lanka’s northeast, as a car bomb explosion outside a girls’ school left at least two people dead.

Action Against Hunger said the latest bodies were in the same seaside town of Muttur where the 15 others were found dead on Friday.

The group has said it will suspend operations in the area, where it was helping to rebuild after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

The victims included 16 Tamils, Sri Lanka’s largest ethnic minority, and one Muslim.

The discovery came as a girl was killed when a car bomb exploded outside a school in the capital Colombo today.

Seven others were wounded in the blast, said Rienzie Perera, a police spokesman.

The identity of the other victim, whose body was inside the vehicle, was not immediately known.

The apparent target was S. Sivathasan, a former politician for the Eelam People’s Democratic Party, which bitterly opposes the country’s separatist Tamil Tiger guerrillas, according to party leader Douglas Devananda.

Sivathasan was injured in the attack and admitted to a hospital, Devananda said.

Also today, suspected rebels ambushed a government patrol near an air force base, killing one airman and wounding two more, military spokesman, Major Upali Rajapakse said.

One civilian was also hurt in the attack in Trincomalee district, about 135 miles northeast of Colombo.

Separately, a bomb blast killed two anti-terrorism police commandos in eastern Ampara today, Rajapakse said, blaming the rebels.

Ampara is 130 miles east of Colombo.

The commandos – members of the government’s Special Task Force, a specially trained unit on combatting terrorism – were travelling on a truck when the blast occurred.

In other fighting this morning, the rebels “fired mortars at us and we retaliated,” Rajapakse said. There was no immediate report of casualties from the artillery barrage.

The Action employees – 13 men and four women – were doing relief work in Muttur for the Paris-based aid agency.

The first set of bodies were found in a group, mostly laying face down and with bullet wounds, aid agency officials said.

The two additional bodies were found late yesterday in a car, apparently killed while trying to flee the violence.

All the bodies have been identified, said Eric Fort, an agency official.

The killings raised outrage internationally, and aid organisations demanded that the perpetrators be brought to justice.

Former US President Bill Clinton, who is also the UN envoy for tsunami recovery, strongly urged Sri Lankan authorities “to do everything possible to apprehend the perpetrators of this crime and to bring them to justice.”

Amnesty International urged the government to seek international assistance in the investigation.

“We are concerned that other high-profile cases of killings and ‘disappearances’ remain unresolved months and even years after the crime,” Natalie Hill, deputy Asia director at Amnesty International, said in a statement.

The government has assured the groups that it will conduct a full probe, according to local media.

“We will conduct a free and fair investigation and bring to book those responsible, whoever they may be,” Minister for Human Rights Mahinda Samarasinghe was quoted as saying by independent newspaper Daily Mirror today.

The latest violence began on July 20 when separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the northeast blocked water supplies to 60,000 people in government-controlled villages.

They said the move came in retaliation for the government reneging on a deal to boost water supplies in rebel areas.

The two sides have since intermittently fought for control of the reservoir and the military says its operation to wrest control of the sluice gate was on.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, as the Tigers are formally known, have fought for more than two decades to carve out a separate homeland for Sri Lanka’s 3.2 million minority Tamils in the north and east.

The 2002 ceasefire between the Tigers and the government put a temporary halt to the bloodshed, but the truce has nearly collapsed in recent months, and renewed fighting has killed more than 900 people – half of them civilians - since December, monitors say.