Sri Lanka to cremate slain minister, blames rebels
(Reuters)
Updated: 2005-08-15 15:31

Sri Lanka prepared to cremate its foreign minister with full state honours on Monday after an assassination President Chandrika Kumaratunga blamed directly on the Tamil Tiger rebels the minister campaigned to outlaw, Reuters reported.

The killing of Lakshman Kadirgamar on Friday night plunged Sri Lanka's protracted peace process into its worst crisis since a 2002 ceasefire in the Tigers' two-decade war for self-rule and has rekindled fears of a return to war.

Carpenters worked through the night to erect a funeral pyre in Colombo's Independence Square as thousands of police scoured the city for the sniper or snipers who shot Kadirgamar four times as he emerged from his swimming pool.

A Sri Lankan soldier stands guard as his colleagues attend a rehearsal ahead of a state funeral for slain Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, in Colombo, Sri Lanka, August 15, 2005. [Reuters]

Soldiers formed a cordon around the funeral site and lined streets trimmed with white flags of mourning.

Kumaratunga accused the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of assassinating Kadirgamar, a Tamil branded a traitor by hardliners, and declared a state of emergency.

"I hope there won't be war. We want peace," said pyre builder Nimal Siri, 46, as he put the finishing touches to the stack of logs draped in white cloth where Kadirgamar was to be cremated.

Police expect up to 10,000 people to attend the funeral.

Shops and cinemas were closed out of respect for the charming, fatherly politician who had long been a target for campaigning to have the Tigers banned as a terrorist group by the United States and Britain.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, Kadirgamar's contemporary at Oxford University, was shocked by the murder of his friend.

"I condemn this brutal and criminal act," Clinton, who visited Sri Lanka recently as a U.N. tsunami aid envoy, said in a statement. "I hope that the people of Sri Lanka will persevere in their efforts to avoid a renewal of hostilities."

CEASEFIRE ENDANGERED

A Sri Lankan man looks at a banner praising slain Foreign Minister Laxman Kadirgamar, in Colombo, August 15, 2005. [Reuters]

Kumaratunga directly blamed the rebels, who have denied any involvement in what analysts dubbed a stock disclaimer that few in Colombo believe.

"Lakshman Kadirgamar joins a long list of distinguished Tamil leaders ... murdered by the LTTE," Kumaratunga, dressed in white, the traditional colour of mourning, said in a televised address to the nation on Sunday night.

"This violation of the ceasefire is the latest in a continuous series of violations by the LTTE," she said. "I have taken many steps to ensure national security after the killing, but will that be enough?"

S.P. Thamilselvan, leader of the Tigers' political wing, told reporters in the northern rebel stronghold of Kilinochchi the Tigers condemned the killing and agreed it endangered the truce.

He called the accusations an effort to sully the Tigers' standing with the international community, which the rebels are wooing in a push for interim self-rule and for a share of $3 billion in foreign tsunami aid.

There are no signs yet of a return to a war in which more than 64,000 people have been killed, but the assassination is a major setback for any hope of converting a 3-1/2-year ceasefire into a lasting end to a conflict that has ravaged swathes of the north and east and displaced tens of thousands of people.

"I'm sure that the ceasefire is in danger more than ever before," Hagrup Haukland, head of the Nordic Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission which oversees the truce, said on Saturday.

The Tigers have said repeatedly the truce could collapse because of a rash of killings in the restive east that the government and rebels blame on each other.

Anger at the killing is welling. Posters have been pasted around Colombo with the slogan "Let's bury the LTTE".

Seventeen people, including at least a dozen Tamils, have been taken into custody in Colombo for questioning -- but the assassins were not thought to be among them.

The Island newspaper bid "farewell to an uncrowned king", and criticised a security detail that failed to close the murder scene quickly enough to stop the killer or killers escaping.

Investigators found cartridge casings from a sniper rifle, a grenade launcher and the remains of food and chocolate wrappers in the house across the street from which Kadirgamar was shot twice in the head, once in the throat and once in the body.

A Tamil couple who own the property are under house arrest for questioning, but have not been charged.

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