COLOMBO, 14 August 2005 — Sri Lanka imposed a state of emergency yesterday, hours after the assassination of the country’s heavily protected foreign minister, deploying soldiers to scour the capital for suspects as helicopters and military jets patrolled territory held by Tamil Tiger rebels.
Officials warned the killing was a major setback to the island’s fragile peace process — and cast doubt on the Tigers’ insistence that they were not behind the attack.
Despite the show of force, the government said it had not taken any steps to break the cease-fire with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, whom the military blamed for killing Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar.
Kadirgamar, 73, an ethnic Tamil who led efforts to ban the Tigers as a terrorist organization but later backed peace efforts, was shot in the head and chest late Friday and died after midnight.
“It is a grave setback to the peace process,” an official who leads government peace efforts, Jayantha Dhanapala, told reporters. “Restarting (the peace process) will be seriously undermined.”
The Tigers began fighting in 1983 for a separate homeland for ethnic Tamils, claiming discrimination by the majority Sinhalese. The civil war killed nearly 65,000 people in the country of 19 million before a Norwegian-brokered cease-fire in 2002.
But subsequent peace talks broke down over rebel demands for greater autonomy in the areas under their control in eastern and northern Sri Lanka.
The rebels’ political chief denied any role in the killing yesterday and criticized officials for “hastily blaming” the group.
“We also know that there are factions within the Sri Lankan armed forces operating with a hidden agenda to sabotage the cease-fire agreement,” said S.P. Tamilselvan. He urged Colombo to thoroughly investigate the killing.
But Sri Lankan officials cast doubt on his statement. “We find it extremely difficult to accept the denial,” government spokesman Nimal Siripala de Silva told reporters. “It’s very very difficult to accept.”
Police Inspector General Chandra Fernando said six shots were fired at Kadirgamar by one or two snipers, and three rounds hit him.
The assassins fired through a hole they had made in a building opposite Kadirgamar’s house, in Colombo’s diplomatic district, he said.
Police said they found cheese and chocolates the snipers ate while waiting for their target, along with a grenade launcher, apparently intended as a backup weapon.
Several people had been detained for questioning, but Fernando refused to say how many. “It can be seven to 70,” he said.
Spokesman De Silva said the government would not take any action that would violate the truce.
President Chandrika Kumaratunga declared a state of emergency earlier yesterday, empowering authorities to detain without charge anyone suspected of taking part in terrorist activities and to search and demolish buildings.
She appealed to Sri Lankans “for calm and restraint in the face of this grave and cowardly attack.”
At dawn, troops took up positions around Colombo, and military spokesman Brig. Daya Ratnayake said soldiers were checking all vehicles moving in and out of the city.
Military jets and helicopters patrolled rebel-held territory, monitoring insurgent movements, and navy patrol boats guarded the coastline, some of which is Tiger-controlled, the military said.
Neighboring India called the assassination a “terrorist crime.” US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denounced it as “a vicious act of terror.”
Hagrup Haukland, chief of a European truce monitoring team, called the killing a “barbaric act.” “Such brutal violence creates fear, distrust and insecurity within society, and therefore represents a serious threat to the cease-fire,” he said.
Kadirgamar, an Oxford-educated lawyer, had led an international campaign against the Tigers, who remain on terrorist lists in five countries, including the United States and Britain. A website sympathetic to the guerrillas said the slain minister had obstructed the rebels’ cause.
“In short Kadirgamar was responsible for our stagnated campaign in the international scene,” the pro-rebel Nitharsanam website said.
Rebel attacks against Sri Lankan political leaders were once common, and Chandrika was gravely wounded in a 1999 assassination attempt blamed on Tamil rebels.
Such high-level attacks stopped after a February 2002 cease-fire, but tensions have recently increased between the government and the rebels. There has been a surge of attacks in the volatile eastern region, occasionally spilling into Colombo.
Kadirgamar was appointed foreign minister in April 2004. He also held the position from 1994 to 2001.
