15 Tsunami Aid Staff Executed in Sri Lanka

Fifteen local aid staff working on tsunami reconstruction on Sri Lanka's north-eastern coast, have been found executed after six days of heavy fighting between government troops and Tamil Tiger rebels.

The Consortium for Humanitarian Agencies said yesterday that a relief team had discovered the corpses in an aid agency office in Muttur, on the edge of rebel territory. "They were lying face down - executed," said CHA chief, Jeevan Thiagarajah. It was not clear who had killed them.

Muttur, across a bay from the deep water port of Trincomalee, has been shattered by the fighting with homes reduced to rubble. The government claims 11,000 people had fled the town over the past few days. The military said that it had lost 17 personnel, while the Tigers put their figure at 32. More than 30 civilians have been reported killed. Some had been sheltering in schools. "We are searching for 100 missing civilians which eyewitnesses say were taken by the Tigers as they left the town," a Sri Lankan army spokesman told the Guardian. There was no word from the Tigers on the dead aid workers last night.

The past week has seen some of the heaviest fighting since the two sides signed a Norwegian-brokered truce in 2002. The clashes were triggered by the closure of a sluice gate in a nearby reservoir that sits in rebel-held territory. This cut off water supplies to 15,000 families, most of whom are of the Sinhalese majority. Rebels say it is a protest by ethnic Tamil civilians angry that promised water tanks never arrived.

Last week Sri Lankan military air strikes and ground assaults plunged the island back into conflict. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam took up weapons more than two decades ago, claiming ethnic discrimination by the Sinhalese against Sri Lanka's 3.2m minority Tamils.

Tamilnet, a website which reports extensively on the Tigers, said that the offer by rebels early yesterday to lift the sluice gates was met by a barrage of Sri Lankan artillery fire. Reuters reported that the head of the unarmed Nordic-staffed ceasefire monitoring mission, retired Swedish Major General Ulf Henricsson, was caught up in the gunfire as he headed towards the sluice, south of Trincomalee.

"(The government) have the information that the LTTE has made this offer," said Tommy Lekenmyr, chief of staff for the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM).

"It is quite obvious they are not interested in water. They are interested in something else. We will blame this on the government."