Nineteen people, including 12 Army and Air Force personnel, were on Wednesday injured in a pre-dawn explosion on a bus in Sri Lanka, the military has said, without ruling out a terror angle.
The explosion took place around 5.45 am when the bus was en route to the military base town of Diyatalawa from the northern peninsula of Jaffna, military spokesman Brigadier Sumith Atapattu has said.
Seven Army and five Air Force personnel besides seven civilians were injured in the incident, Brig. Atapattu said.
The explosion occurred at Kahagolla area in Diyatalawa. The bus was heavily damaged and the injured were hospitalised.
“The explosion cannot be ruled out as an act of terrorism as yet. A explosive substance inside the bus may have been the cause. The cause can be ruled out only after the government analyst inspects the scene,” Brig. Atapattu was quoted as saying by the Daily Mirror.
Army’s media unit has said that police investigations were in progress.
Sri Lanka saw a brutal civil war involving the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and had witnessed large scale violence during the 30-year-long separatist movement that had claimed over 100,000 lives.
Hundreds of security personnel were also killed in the fight till 2009, when the LTTE was finally crushed by the Lankan military with the death of its supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran.
