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Many killed after Sri Lanka blast There has been a sharp increase in violence in Trincomalee (Photo: Dharmatasa Kantale) At least 14 people have been killed in a bomb attack and subsequent unrest in north-eastern Sri Lanka, police say. More than 40 others were injured in the blast in a Trincomalee market which brought mobs onto the streets. Shops and cars were torched before a curfew. Earlier, two policemen were killed and two hurt in a blast near the port town. Four blasts blamed on Tamil rebels, who deny involvement, have claimed more than 30 lives since Monday. Talks...

COLOMBO, Feb 11 (Reuters) - The Sri Lankan military said Tamil Tiger rebels blew themselves up on a trawler smuggling weapons on Saturday to avoid a search ahead of peace talks in Switzerland later this month, but the rebels denied involvement. A spokesman for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) said the trawler might have simply been an innocent Sri Lankan or Indian fishing boat. The rebels have routinely denied involvement in recent incidents. The military said one of its fast attack boats had intercepted a deep sea trawler heading for a rebel-held section of the island's northwest coast....

Toronto, 16 January, Paul Martin, the Leader of the Liberal Party and the Prime Minister of Canada attended all the LTTE’s fundraisers, therefore Tamil Canadians will vote for the Liberals and no one else. In a letter the Editor, one Mauyran Thigaratnam angrily protested to an article written by Raveen Satkurunathan Tamil Canadian votes and upcoming Canadian elections, where he wrote “I intend to vote for the Conservatives this January.” Mauyran Thigaratnam, a Canadian Tamil of Sri Lanka origin, said to be a resident of Toronto wrote, “Who ever wrote that article about the Tamil Canadians voting for PC is...

NEW DELHI, July 8: The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers as they are commonly known, are providing military training to the Maoist rebels of Nepal in Bihar near the Nepalese borders. Some French trainers have also been hired, a Maoist rebel leader revealed to the South Asia Tribune.

Patna, July 13: Authorities in Bihar are concerned over reports of LTTE imparting training to Nepalese Maoists and Naxalites in the state to raise human bomb squads for suicide missions and recent spurt in their activities in districts along the Indo-Nepal border. The security establishment in Bihar went into a tizzy after the June 23 attack by CPI (Maoist) Naxalites on the Madhuban police station, banks and RJD MP Sitaram Singh's house in east Champaran district and the subsequent encounter in which 20 Naxalites, two policemen and a bank guard lost their lives. Dozens of weapons, around 100 rounds of...

Sunday, May 29, 2005 (Kalmunai): Former US President Bill Clinton on Saturday backed a proposal that would see the Sri Lankan president and Tamil Tiger rebels cooperate in distribution of foreign aid to victims of the December 26 tsunami. Clinton, UN special envoy for tsunami recovery, was in Sri Lanka on the second leg of a planned four-nation tour to ensure that post-tsunami aid is distributed properly. But later on Saturday, he cancelled a planned tour of tsunami-hit areas of the Maldives due to exhaustion, a United Nations official said.

LTTE terror stalks Australian media Melbourne, 30 January: The Melbourne-based office of the Serendib - a nation-wide community newspaper for Sri Lankans in Australia - was vandalized and three laptops, three PCs, CDs on which the backup information was stored were removed on Friday night(28). This vandalizing was aimed at crippling the production of this monthly. The raid on the Serendib office occurred after the latest January issue carried an interview with Sri Lanka's High Commissioner, Maj-Gen. Janaka Perera. In it the High Commissioner exposed the false propaganda of the agents of the LTTE in Australia accusing the Sri Lankan...

MUMBAI: Mafia gangs here are major buyers of small arms in the international market, and police here are not surprised by reports that they are now making purchases from Nepal's Maoist guerrillas. The mafia has established links in the international drugs, arms and human trafficking circuit for several years, police officers say. Apart from different guns, the mafia is known to buy assault rifles and huge amounts of ammunition. The underworld is known to show a preference for grenades. However, considering the small scale of their operations, Mumbai's mafia dons do not go in for items like grenade launchers, which...

COLOMBO: The reclusive leader of Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger guerrillas has appeared in public for the first time since the tsunami, quelling rumours that he had been killed in the disaster, a pro-rebel website reported. Velupillai Prabhakaran had met relief workers in the northern town of Kilinochchi on Monday, Tamilnet.com said. It carried a picture showing him in combat fatigues chairing a meeting. "Although our people have suffered through severe hardships, we are shocked by the scale of destruction and loss of life the tsunami has inflicted on our people," it quoted Prabhakaran as saying. Rumours that Prabhakaran had...

No one should have been surprised that the same Tamils who supply guns to terrorists are collecting money in Canada for the tsunami victims of South Asia. Long before devastating tsunami waves claimed tens of thousands of souls in Sri Lanka, the Canadian Liberal government had established a record for being soft on Tamil Tiger fundraising. Both Prime Minister Paul Martin when he was Minister of Finance and Member of Parliament Maria Minna attended a May 2000, $600-a-plate fund raising dinner organized by a front organization for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Genial dinner hosts to Martin and Minna,...

COLOMBO : Elusive Tamil Tiger chief Velupillai Prabhakaran and his intelligence chief Pottu Amman are among the dead or missing after last week's tsunami disaster, state radio said Saturday, sparking fresh tension between government and rebels who immediately denied the report. The Island newspaper, meanwhile, reported Saturday that an expensive coffin "for a top LTTE leader" had been smuggled into a northern Tiger area inside a container carrying relief for tsunami survivors. The LTTE, in a statement posted on its official Peace Secretariat website, slammed the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation for carrying the reports, saying now was "not the...

MULLAITIVU, Sri Lanka - This town is no stranger to carnage, always bouncing back from the damages suffered during its periodic turns on the front lines of Sri Lanka's two-decade civil war. A government assault drove out ethnic Tamil rebels in 1990. After six years of siege, the guerrillas took it back in a ferocious, one-day battle that wiped out the army garrison of 1,200 and killed 800 rebels. The Tamils rebuilt, and the rebels' secretive chief, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, even made the town his home. But Mullaitivu met its match in Asia's tsunami catastrophe. Sitting on Sri Lanka's northeast coast,...

[World News]: Colombo, Dec 28 : About 8,000 people have died and half a million displaced in Sri Lanka's northeast following the deadly tsunami, Tamil Tiger guerrillas said Tuesday. A website run by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) said the Tamil Rehabilitation Organisation (TRO), a rebel front, was engaged on a "war footing" rendering humanitarian assistance in the coastal areas. Media reports quoted a leader of LTTE's Sea Tigers as saying that two Sea Tigers bases at Mullaitivu, in the country's rebel-held northeast, had been wiped out and an unspecified number of LTTE cadres had perished. Sri Lanka's...

Click HERE to see a flyer with more information on David's new book.  In January 2004, President Bush delivered his annual State of the Union address. He reviewed the victories of the past two years in Afghanistan and Iraq, and assessed the war tasks ahead. Homeland security was prominent on the president’s agenda and its cornerstone was the Patriot Act, which Congress had passed in 2001 just after the World Trade Center attack. When the president came to the point in his address where he intended to ask legislators to renew the Act, there was an unscripted moment in...

Tamil suicide boat rams tanker A suicide bomber struck in Colombo on Monday A Tamil Tiger suicide boat packed with explosives has rammed an oil tanker off northern Sri Lanka, setting the ship on fire, military officials said. Navy patrols are reported to have rescued 12 crew members and 13 security personnel from the tanker, named as the MV Silk Pride, but three people are missing. The Associated Press news agency reported that the ship had sunk, but other reports said it was still ablaze. On Monday a suicide bomber killed himself and three others in Colombo, as campaigning ...

Freedom of speech permits supporting terrorism, as long as you are only providing "expert advice and assistance" to groups the federal government has designated as “foreign terrorist organizations.” So says a California district judge, in a decision that can only be disheartening for those on the frontlines of the struggle against terrorism. We can hope the decision will be set aside on appeal, but it nevertheless shows how vulnerable our legal instruments are against international terrorism -- and how powerful the influence is of those who would dismantle existing Homeland Security legislation. The Decision In a decision released January 26,...

Child soldiers: Easy to train, willing to killBy Sudha Ramachandran BANGALORE - The recruitment of children and adolescents as combatants, while common among militant groups, is also practiced by some governments, since many children and young people are easily lured to a life of adventure, danger and patriotic duty and easily conditioned to follow orders. The United Nations and its Convention on the Rights of the Child define children as those under 18 unless national lawa defines majority earlier. According to that definition, the United States, the United Kingdom and other nations routinely recruit volunteer children into the ranks...

WASHINGTON: US Lawyers are challenging, on the behalf LTTE, some of the provisions of the 'Patriot Act' which ban providing "expert advice and assistance" to organisations declared to be terrorist by the government. Georgetown Law Professor David Cole and the Humanitarian Law Project are challenging the provision that bans providing "expert advice and assistance" to organizations that the government has deemed to have connections with terrorism, according to a university newspaper Georgetown Hoya . Cole and Nancy Chang, senior attorney at the Centre for Constitutional Rights in New York, will represent Tamil organizations and a Tamil American doctor, Nagalingam Jeyalingam,...

By Edward Luce Published: November 4 2003 17:21 | Last Updated: November 4 2003 17:21 Sri Lanka's 20-month-old peace process looked to be in jeopardy on Tuesday night after Chandrika Kumaratunga, the country's president, suspended parliament and dismissed three cabinet ministers in what many saw as a prelude to a snap election. The Sri Lankan military deployed troops in Colombo within hours of the dismissal of the defence, interior and media ministers. "We have deployed troops in a couple of key locations to prevent any disturbances," army spokesman Sumedha Perera said, listing the government press, state media and a power...

Three Tamil Tiger rebels have blown themselves up after Scandinavian truce monitors boarded their heavily armed boat, hours before peace talks resumed in Germany. The three members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) committed suicide on their trawler off the northern coast of Jaffna as they tried to smuggle arms on the island. Now we'll have to see how such incidents can be avoided "They have blown up the boat. They have gone with the blast," said Teitur Torkelsson, of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission. Despite the incident, talks between the rebels and the Sri Lankan Government are...