Gunboat sinking may push Lanka back to war

The Norwegian-led Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) said they could not accept a denial by the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of involvement in Saturday's attack against the gunboat.

"The LTTE have denied any involvement," the SLMM said in a statement, even though official Tiger websites did not comment on the incident, the worst since the two sides agreed last month to uphold their fragile truce.

"However, based on SLMM's previous experience ... we feel that we cannot at this stage rule out their involvement."

The SLMM asked the Tiger guerrillas, who are known for their trade-mark suicide bombings, to fully cooperate with the investigation into Saturday's incident at the Gulf of Mannar.

The defence ministry said the gunboat was blown out of the water as it approached a Tamil Tiger trawler off the island's northwestern coast.

"There is a probe underway to establish how the gunboat was hit," a defence official said. "The initial report from the navy is that six Tigers on the trawler blasted themselves and the impact of that explosion sank the gunboat."

The navy was on a mission to check gun running in the area, officials said, adding that the gunboat had searched four other trawlers before it was blown up. There had been reports of rebel gun running in the area, officials said.

The Scandinavian monitors said there was a "dangerous escalation of violence" despite the two sides agreeing during talks in Switzerland last month to scale down attacks against each other.

"If the parties do not take responsibility (for maintaining the ceasefire) we fear that the situation could become gradually worse resulting in an escalation beyond what we had in December and January," the SLMM said, referring to a rise in violence that claimed at least 153 lives.

The mission, which said it was still investigating Saturday's incident, urged both the government and the Tigers to live up to the pledges they gave last month to uphold their troubled truce in place since February 23, 2002.

The incident is the first major attack since the two sides met in Switzerland and agreed to abide by the ceasefire to prevent a return to a civil war that has claimed at least 60,000 lives since 1972.