The Editor of an anti-government newspaper was shot dead in Sri Lanka yesterday, two days after attackers torched the offices of a privately owned television station.

Lasantha Wickramatunga, of the Sunday Leader newspaper, was shot in the chest, head and abdomen while travelling to work in his car. He died several hours later on the operating table. The two men who shot him were believed to have escaped on motorcycles.

The murder was the latest in a string of assaults on journalists critical of the Government in an atmosphere of growing patriotic fervour whipped up by the seemingly imminent military collapse of the Tamil Tiger guerrillas in the north.

The Sunday Leader is virulently anti-establishment and has exposed several privatisation deals that were eventually overturned. Mr Wickramatunga had fought multiple defamation cases brought by senior politicians.

Non-governmental groups say that attacks aimed at independent journalists and the Tamil minority have soared in recent weeks as military successes on the battlefield increase.

President Rajapaksa condemned the Editor’s murder and ordered an investigation into the death a man he called a close friend and courageous journalist. “This heinous crime points to the grave dangers faced by the democratic social order of our country,” he said. It was the second such assault in three days. On Tuesday the headquarters of the country’s biggest private television station, Maharaja TV, were burnt to the ground. The Government had called its war coverage unpatriotic.

As the Sri Lankan military close in on the last redoubts of the rebel Tamil Tigers, fears are growing of a rapidly growing humanitarian crisis and an increase in ethnic and political intimidation by the Government. Aid workers have expressed alarm at the number of people being made homeless by the fighting. They estimate that a quarter of a million have been displaced and an unknown number killed as the civil war appears to reach its endgame. Human rights groups say that the Tigers’ refusal to allow civilians to leave the conflict area — despite suffering massive territorial losses including their de facto capital Kilinochchi — has left the displaced trapped in a rapidly shrinking zone.

People who have escaped the Tigers’ clutches have been virtually imprisoned in camps by the Sri Lankan military.

Attempts to help refugees have been seriously hindered by a near-blanket ban on aid groups going to the war zone since September.

Another rebel-held town was overrun yesterday as the military continued to make gains. The capture of Pallai, on the narrow isthmus connecting the Jaffna Peninsula with the rest of the island, came after the rebels reportedly withdrew much of their artillery and heavy weaponry into their jungle strongholds to the south.

The UN, one of the few organisations still allowed to distribute supplies to war-hit areas, told The Times that more were urgently needed. “More relief supplies need to reach the population, especially those for shelter and sanitation,” James Elder, a UN spokesman in Sri Lanka, said. “We know that more people have been displaced in the past two weeks and they must be allowed to move freely.”

He added that supplies being sent by the UN included hygiene kits, water tanks and mosquito nets, but that it had few people on the ground to distribute them.

Human Rights Watch criticised the Sri Lankan military for placing the few who had fled the fighting in prison camps — despite the Government announcing this week that it was officially making the Tamil Tigers a proscribed organisation because it would not allow people to leave the conflict zone.

“The sad irony is that many of those now detained by the Government were fleeing abuses. This detention policy is hurting the very people that the Government should be helping,” Brad Adams, the group’s Asia director, said.

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