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The ambassadors of the United States and Italy were wounded Tuesday in an artillery attack by suspected Tamil rebels in eastern Sri Lanka, Human Rights Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe told AFP.
Samarasinghe, who was accompanying a group of Colombo-based diplomats to the district of Batticaloa, said the attack came shortly after one of two helicopters landed at a public playground.
“The ambassadors (US ambassador Robert Blake and Italian envoy Prio Mariani) are slightly hurt,” Samarasinghe said by telephone. “I was not injured. A shell fell a short distance away from where we were.”
A doctor at the main hospital in Batticaloa, 303 kilometres (187 miles) east of here by road, said the Italian ambassador had suffered head injuries.
“The diplomat has a foreign object embedded inside his head,” hospital director Muruganathan Moorthy told AFP. “We had a total of 11 people admitted after the shell attack.”
Four policemen, three Special Task Force commandos, two airforce men and a child were among the wounded.
Samarasinghe was taking the Colombo-based ambassadors to Batticaloa where security forces last month captured a key stronghold of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
President Mahinda Rajapakse visited the area last month to demonstrate that security forces had flushed out the guerrillas who had previously been shelling military installations in the coastal region.
Military officials said four shells hit the area where the first helicopter landed and a second helicopter did not touch down there.
A fixed-wing aircraft parked at the nearby military airfield was also damaged, military spokesman Prasad Samarasinghe said.
Local officials said they were set to hold a meeting with the diplomats in the town to discuss the situation in the area following the latest military operations against the Tiger rebels.
The attack came days after the fifth anniversary of a truce between troops and the Tiger rebels. The ceasefire is holding only on paper, according to Scandinavian truce monitors.
The Oslo-backed peace process suffered yet another blow last week when the Tigers vowed to resume their campaign for independence and statehood, scrapping a 2002 pledge to agree to a federal solution to end decades of ethnic conflict.
The US and the European Union have banned the Tigers, but also called on the Colombo government to try and resume negotiations to peacefully end a conflict which has claimed more than 60,000 lives since 1972.
Last month, US ambassador Blake warned Sri Lanka against a military solution and urged the government to share power with Tamil Tiger rebels and end decades of ethnic bloodshed.
“We remain unwavering in our conviction that there can be no military solution to this terrible conflict,” Blake said at the opening of a two-day meeting to review foreign aid to the island.
Blake spoke at a ceremony attended by President Mahinda Rajapakse who on Thursday vowed to crush “terrorism” as his troops dismantled a de facto separate state run by Tiger rebels in the Batticaloa district.
