Tigers, troops accuse each other of attacks

The Tigers said a senior militant was killed in an ambush by troops and paramilitaries in the east, while the army said they were not involved but had heard an explosion and shooting.

Two rocket propelled grenades were then fired at a military bunker from behind rebel lines.

A military spokesman said they were not apportioning blame for the grenade attack, but another army source said they believed it had been carried out by the Tigers.

"This is madness," said Hagrup Haukland, the Norwegian ex-soldier who heads the unarmed Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM). "There are parties in this country who want nothing but war. If this goes on, the ceasefire agreement talks will go down the drain."

A string of suspected rebel attacks on government troops nearly destroyed a 2002 truce and brought the island to the edge of a new civil war, but on Wednesday, Norwegian truce broker Erik Solheim got the two sides to agree to direct talks.

Senior delegations from the rebels and government are to meet in Switzerland in February to discuss the implementation of the truce, he said, a meeting diplomats said was badly needed after about 200 people were killed in less than two months.

The Tigers denied they had fired on the army on Thursday, and said they were extremely concerned by the attack on them.

"The leadership is seriously disturbed," S. Puleedevan, the head of the Tiger peace secretariat, told Reuters from the rebel de facto capital Kilinochchi.

He did not say the talks were threatened, but warned: "This is not going to help the peace process. Definitely it is going to create problems."

The incident occurred in an area monitors say is a stronghold of the Karuna group, a rebel faction, which has split from the mainstream.

It is believed linked to the government, and the SLMM says security forces have turned a blind eye to its activities.

Analysts say Karuna Amman, a former Tiger commander with strong support in the east, would be crucial to the army in any new war. But in peacetime, they say he might be assassinated by the Tigers and so his force is one of a handful of groups with a strong motive to wreck the truce.