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Government in a hurry over polls: TULF

COLOMBO: The Sri Lankan military on Sunday said the number of LTTE cadres and the soldiers killed in Saturday’s battles in the north had gone up to 52 and eight respectively. Meanwhile, Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) chief V. Anandasangree charged the Mahinda Rajapaksa government with going ahead with elections to the eastern province in a “great hurry”.

In a letter addressed to Mr. Rajapaksa, the TULF leader argued that free and fair elections were not feasible until all “armed groups are disarmed.”

The immediate provocation for the missive is the reported decision to re-deploy sections of the Special Task Force (STF) from the Amparai district.

However, the government has termed reports on the re-deployment in a section of the local media as “misleading” saying only a few units of the STF were being pulled out for deployment in the northern battle front. Mr. Anandasangree said there was no doubt that the East had been liberated but not cleared fully of the LTTE problem.

In a sharp reaction to the reports on re-deployment, the Defence Ministry alleged that such news items were aimed at “ethnic backlash.”

The Ministry charged that two articles with headings, “STF withdrawn from 10 camps in the East” and “Pillayan group wants the STF to out of East: UNP,” were an attempt to portray that the Ministry was to withdraw the units as part of some “unholy agreement between the security forces and the political party TMVP.”

Separately, the military said reports received from the battlefronts in the North indicated that 52 terrorists were killed and at least 42 injured during Saturday’s military offensives aimed at “liberating” the Wanni region.

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