Shelling reported in Sri Lankan Tamil war zone

COLOMBO – Sri Lankan forces pounded rebel territory with a fierce artillery barrage yesterday, a day after the government pledged to stop using heavy weapons to prevent civilian casualties, a rebel-linked Web site and a doctor in the region said.

Military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara denied the accusation, saying that the Sri Lankan forces were using only small arms in the battle.
The bombardment by artillery, mortar shells and multi-barrel rocket launchers started late Monday and lasted through yesterdaysday morning, the TamilNet Web site reported.
About a dozen shells hit a makeshift hospital inside rebel territory, killing five patients and sending many others fleeing for their lives, said Dr Thangamuttu Sathyamurthi, a government physician working in the war zone. Other civilians in the area were also killed, he said.
‘I saw four dead bodies on the side of the road outside the hospital and two bodies in a trench,’ he said.
Journalists and aid groups are barred from the war zone, making reports of the fighting difficult to verify.
The government has faced intense international pressure to accept a temporary truce to allow tens of thousands of trapped civilians to escape the fighting. Instead, it said Monday it would stop using artillery attacks, airstrikes and other heavy weapons in the offensive to ensure the safety of the civilians.
The government, which accuses the Tamil Tigers of holding the civilians as human shields, said it would not agree to a truce because any letup in the battle would allow the rebels to regroup just as they stand on the verge of defeat in their quarter-century separatist war.
Early yesterday, Sri Lankan forces took over a line of earthen fortifications the rebels had constructed to protect the tiny strip of land they still control along the northeast coast, Nanayakkara said. Troops recovered the bodies of seven rebel fighters, he said.
Sri Lankan forces also foiled a rebel attempt to send an explosives-laden truck barreling at them, Nanayakkara said. The truck exploded short of its target, wounding several soldiers, he said, without elaborating.
International concern has grown over the safety of the estimated 50 000 ethnic Tamil civilians still trapped in the war zone, especially in light of a recent UN report that nearly 6 500 noncombatants have already been killed in the recent offensive.
The Tamil Tigers, listed as a terrorist group by many Western nations, have been fighting since 1983 for an ethnic Tamil state in the north and east after decades of marginalisation by governments dominated by the Sinhalese majority.
New York-based Human Rights Watch called on the UN Security Council to create an international commission of inquiry to look into abuses by both sides.
– Nampa-AP