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11 rebels killed in Sri Lanka battle
 Sri Lankan troops have killed at least 11 Tamil Tiger rebels in the battle for the last urban area still in the hands of the guerrillas, the Defence Ministry said on Thursday.The deaths occurred on Wednesday when soldiers pushed toward Puthukkudiriruppu, a town on a narrow strip of land in the northeast controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the ministry said. "Ground troops have positioned for a final thrust towards the remaining LTTE foothold," the ministry said. It did not say if security forces suffered any casualties. The LTTE did not comment on the fighting. Separately, a Tamil newspaper editor was arrested in Colombo on Thursday, police said, after colleagues and family members complained that he had been abducted while attending a funeral. Police spokesman Senior Superintendent Ranjith Gunasekara said N Vidyatharan was taken in for questioning by the police crime division in connection with activities linked to LTTE. However, the state-run Daily News had earlier quoted Gunasekara as saying that the editor had been "abducted" by unidentified persons driving an unmarked white van. Family members said three armed men dressed in police uniforms grabbed Vidyatharan, chief editor of the Sudaroli and Uthayan newspapers, while he attended the funeral of a relative in Mount Lavinia, a suburb of the capital. "The three men in uniform tried to grab Vidyatharan. He resisted and the other mourners at the funeral started shouting, but they dragged him on the floor and took him away in a van," the relative said. Vidyatharan's newspapers have been staunchly critical of the military campaign against Tamil Tiger rebels, who are cornered in the northeast of the island. There have been several armed attacks on Vidyatharan's newspaper offices and his arrest came seven weeks after another senior editor was gunned down execution-style by unidentified attackers in the same area. Posted by: Fred 2009-02-27 |
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