Tigers vow to use navy

Thirteen of the victims were gunned down in separate incidents in the northern islet of Kayts on Saturday night, the military said. Two more people were killed in the restive northeastern port district of Trincomalee.

Another two were gunned down at Atchchuvely in the northern Jaffna peninsula, police said. On Sunday, a soldier was killed when suspected Tigers lobbed grenades at troops, the military said, adding that it retaliated and killed one of the attackers.

Authorities were investigating if the killings were linked to the ongoing Tamil separatist conflict amid a spate of tit-for-tat attacks in the north and east in recent weeks.

More than 200 people have died in clashes over the past month despite a four-year truce between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in an ethnic conflict that has claimed over 60,000 lives since 1972.

President Mahinda Rajapakse, 60, said in an interview with the island's Sunday Times that the government is still committed to a four-year ceasefire. However, he said he ordered recent air attacks against rebel positions as "preventive action to avert another war."

"If they insist on continuing their attacks, I have to defend my country," Rajapakse said.

The LTTE's naval wing chief, Thillaiampalam Sivanesan, better known as "Colonel Soosai", raised the stakes at the weekend by insisting that the rebels were "not prepared to relinquish sovereign rights to the seas" following a major naval battle last week.

"We will not hesitate to wage war with anyone who attempts to prevent us from exercising our freedom," Soosai said in remarks published on the pro-rebel Tamilnet website.

The remarks came after Scandinavian truce observers known as the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) said in a statement last week that it was reviewing its practice of putting monitors on government vessels following the sea battle Thursday which it said violated the ceasefire.

Eighteen sailors were killed when the Tigers sank a gunboat that was escorting a ship transporting troops. The Tigers said four of their Sea Tigers were dead but the military said it killed about 30 guerrillas.

The Sri Lankan navy said the SLMM monitors had not boarded their craft since the sea battle, but the navy is continuing its patrols off the north and east.

"We have in fact stepped up our operations," navy spokesman P.D.K. Dassanayake said.

Soosai has strongly criticised the monitors for their ruling that the LTTE are in violation of the February 2002 ceasefire if they venture out onto the Indian Ocean or use Sri Lankan airspace.

He said the LTTE's naval arm, the Sea Tigers, had lost 1,200 men and women in the past 15 years and would not halt operations.

"Even during intense war, we were able to establish sea links with distant lands at our will. No party was able to stop us then. How can anyone, especially within a period of peace, try to scuttle this ability?" he said.

The Tigers have been increasingly taking their fight to the seas thanks to their secretive and lethal rebel "navy," a rarity among the world's guerrilla forces.

The European Union criticised the rebels Saturday for staging Thursday's sea battle and warned that it could wreck peace prospects.