TAMIL TIGER GUNMEN RAID A VILLAGE PREPARING FOR NEW YEAR FESTIVITIES AND KILL SIX WOMEN AND ONE MAN

By Walter Jayawardhana

Suspected Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) gun men raided an ethnic Sinhalese village randomly killing six women and one man, who were getting ready to celebrate the Sinhalese and Hindu New Year celebrations.

Then Ministry of Defense called the indiscriminate killing of the unarmed civilians in the Northern Province village of Avaranthulawa, in the District of Vavuniya as ethnic cleansing.

The people of Sri Lanka celebrate April 14 as the New Year day according to an ancient astrological calendar, like many other Hindu and Buddhist societies in India , Burma, Laos, Cambodia , Java, and Thailand.

"They were firing indiscriminately and, due to that, there were seven civilians killed," said Lieutenant Colonel Upali Rajapakse, spokesperson for the media centre for national security.

Rajapaksa further said that villagers were able to identify the shooters as Tamil Tigers by their uniforms, and the incident was part of a campaign to target civilians that included two claymore mine attacks on public buses in the past 10 days in the same area, the restive district of Vavuniya.
In the same District of Vavuniya but at a different village called Aralaganwila identified Tamil Tigers shot and killed four villagers on April 5.

The Ministry of Defense said, “LTTE is a ruthless terror group who fights for a mono-ethnic separate homeland for the Tamil living in Sri Lanka since 1983. It has been the outfit's strategy since its inception to flush out Singhalese and Muslim people from North and East by bloody ethnic cleansing raids. Thousands of civilians, mostly women and children were perished in the most ruthless massacres during its 20 years of terror campaign.”