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News Story
 April 14, 2007 A THREE-YEAR-OLD boy and a teenage girl were among five civilians dragged out of their homes and shot dead in eastern Sri Lanka, the military said today, the fifth attack on civilians this month in the country’s war-wrecked north and east. The military blamed separatist Tamil Tiger rebels for the massacre on Friday night in Eravur town, Batticaloa district, 130 miles east of the capital, Colombo. The five, including a three-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl, were made to kneel outside their homes before being shot, an official at the Defence Ministry’s information centre said, citing local police. Rebel officials could not immediately be reached for comment. At least 42 civilians have been killed in targeted attacks this month and both government troops and Tamil guerrillas blame each other. On April 1, six ethnic Sinhalese workers were gunned down in Batticaloa district while helping to build an orphanage and the next day a bomb blast inside a bus in adjoining Ampara district killed 16 passengers. Five days later a bus was caught in a roadside bomb blast in Vavuniya district and eight passengers died. Last Thursday gunmen stormed a village in Vavuniya and shot dead seven people. The International Committee of the Red Cross this week expressed grave concern at the increasing civilian deaths in Sri Lanka’s escalating armed conflict and asked all sides to respect international humanitarian laws. Sri Lanka’s civil conflict flared up in 1983 when Tamil separatists began fighting the government to create an independent homeland for ethnic minority Tamils who have suffered decades of discrimination by ethnic Sinhalese-dominated governments. A Norway-brokered cease-fire signed in 2002 prevented large-scale fighting but a resurgence of violence since 2005 has taken the death toll past 69,000. Both sides say that the cease-fire exists only on paper but neither have withdrawn from it officially. URL: story url
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