Tamil Tiger leader killed barely a week after Tiger suicide squad kills 13 soldiers.
November 3, 2007 8:42 am Tamil TigersNEW DELHI, Nov. 2 — The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Sri Lankan separatist group known for suicide attacks on political and military targets, lost their most prominent international representative on Friday when the head of their political wing was killed in an airstrike by the Sri Lankan military, according to the guerrilla group.
The Tamil Tigers announced the death of the leader, S. P. Tamilselvan, along with those of five associates, in a news release issued early in the afternoon Sri Lanka time. The Sri Lankan military said he had been killed in air force strikes on an area called Thirivearu, near the rebel garrison of Kilinochchi, where the military said senior rebel leaders had gathered for a meeting. There was no independent verification available of exactly when he was killed, or where.
The killing further ratcheted up the stakes in Sri Lanka’s renewed quarter-century-long ethnic conflict between the majority ethnic Sinhalese-dominated government and the rebels, also known as the L.T.T.E. For more than a year, a series of open military attacks and counterattacks, suicide bombings and mysterious abductions has left no pretense that a 2002 cease-fire agreement, which Mr. Tamilselvan had helped draft, still holds.