SRI LANKA was sliding back into civil war yesterday, after the military launched air strikes and shelled rebel Tamil positions in retaliation for a suicide attack that left the country’s top army officer badly injured.

There were fears that the island’s uneasy four-year ceasefire was unravelling and that simmering ethnic conflict could reignite into the sort of all-out war that raged in the 1980s and 1990s.

The bloody sequence of events was triggered yesterday morning when a suspected member of the Black Tigers suicide squad penetrated the heavily fortified Sri Lankan military headquarters in Colombo.

Posing as a pregnant woman and showing forged identity documents, the Tamil bomber concealed explosives around her waist and set off her device next to a car carrying Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka, the recently appointed army chief of staff.

Witnesses reported seeing a “fireball” as the explosion ripped through the compound, leaving a circle of dead and wounded.

The army reported that at least 8 were killed in the blast and 27 wounded, including Lt Gen Fonseka who suffered severe abdominal injuries and was operated on by a team of 10 surgeons. He was said last night to be in critical condition.

The general is a decorated 35-year veteran infantry officerwho was promoted to his present post by President Rajapakse, when he came to office in November. General Fonseka had spoken out against the truce, which he said was too soft on the Tamil rebels.

Within hours of the attack in Colombo — the first of its kind in a year — fighter jets and artillery batteries pounded suspected Tamil Tiger positions near the northeast port of Trincomalee. “There are at least two aircraft dropping bombs into our areas and there is shelling from army camps nearby,” S S Elilan, a rebel leader in the area, said.

Major-General Ulf Henricsson, a member of the Nordic truce monitors in the region, said he hoped the violence would be short-lived. “Air strikes are confirmed, bombing and gunfire from Trincomalee naval base is confirmed,” the retired Swedish general said.

“My assessment — which is also my hope — is that this is a limited retaliatory strike for today’s attack.”

Daya Master, the Tamil Tigers spokesman, insisted that the rebels intended to respect the truce.He said that they had no intention of pulling out of the ceasefire agreement, although it was widely accepted that only the Tamil Tigers could have been responsible.Others were less optimistic, however, pointing out that yesterday’s violence followed a serious escalation of fighting in Sri Lanka, where some 90 people have been killed this month alone, half of them soldiers and police. “This has the potential of going back to war,” Champika Liyanaarachchi, the associate editor of the Colombo Daily Mirror, said. She added that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had been building up their strength and bolstering recruitment in anticipation for a new round of fighting.

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Norwegian intermediaries persuaded both sides to respect a ceasefire in 2002, ending 20 years of civil war that claimed the lives of 64,000 people.

But the violence has steadily escalated this year. Last week peace talks broke down in Geneva, when the rebels refused to sit down with the government citing a disagreement over how to transport the Tamil delegation to the talks and concern about alleged state support for a breakaway Tamil movement in the east.

“Today’s attack has upped the ante. It is an open challenge to the state,” said Chara Latta Hogg, an expert on Sri Lanka at the Royal Institute for International Affairs. She added that the Tamil Tigers had reportedly infiltrated some 500 “sleeping cadres” into Colombo and that more attacks and bombings could follow. “If these peace talks do not resume, then open conflict is just a matter of time,” she said.

Jehan Perera, the head of National Peace Council think tank, said that both the Tiger attack and the government response were acts of war.

Masters of the human bomb

THE Tamil Tigers were not the first to use the human bomb, but they perfected the art and were the first to celebrate bombers as heroes in the way that Japan did its kamikaze pilots.

Their first suicide attack was a 1987 truck bombing in an army camp that killed 40 troops. It has since been estimated that the Tigers have been responsible for a quarter of all the world’s suicide attacks in the 25 years before the last Iraq War. High profile victims included the former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the former Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa.

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