Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers accused the government on Monday of thrusting a war on them by using a rival rebel faction to weaken their forces and said they were ready to return to the battlefield.
The warning came less than a week after a suicide bomb blast blamed on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) killed five people at a police station in the capital, the first such attack since the government and rebels agreed to a truce in 2002.
Both the rebels and the government have said they do not want to break the Norwegian-brokered truce that has given the island its best chance to end the war that killed 64,000 over more than two decades.
The LTTE says the military is aiding a rebel faction led by a breakaway eastern fighter known as Karuna, and is complicit in ongoing violence in his home base of Batticaloa.
"This would make it plain to the Tamil people that the Sri Lankan state is not interested at all in taking forward the peace process but is only bent on using the talks and the cease-fire to wage a terrorist war on us," E. Kausalyan, head of the Tigers' political wing in Batticaloa said on the Tamilnet Web site.
"We are ready to face the war that the Sri Lankan state has decided to thrust on us thus," he said on the pro-rebel site.
Defence Secretary Cyril Herath said security forces were under strict instructions to stick to the cease-fire and denied they were involved with Karuna.
"Karuna's people can act on their own - they don't need help," he told Reuters.
"The instructions we have given to security forces is that they should in no way in word or deed do anything to perpetrate violence," he said.
Nordic monitors overseeing the truce said they met the Tigers' political wing in the rebel-held north on Sunday, but it was a routine meeting not prompted by the suicide bomb.
"They want to respect the cease-fire," spokeswoman Disa Finnboga said.
The Tigers have denied a role in the suicide blast, but police said the target was Tamil government minister Douglas Devananda, one of their most outspoken critics and a challenge to their claim to be the sole legitimate representative of the island's minority Tamils.
Devananda said he has had contact with Karuna, who has gone underground since the Tigers launched an offensive against him in April. Karuna was still in Batticaloa, he said.
Karuna, a top Tiger fighter and military strategist before he split from the group in March, told the BBC on Monday he was in the east and planned to set up a party and enter mainstream politics.
He said LTTE leader Velupilllai Prabhakaran was not sincere about a negotiated settlement to the war over a separate state for Tamils in the north and east of Sri Lanka.
While a return to full-scale war was unlikely, peace talks stalled since April 2003 could not resume until the situation in the east was resolved, military and LTTE sources said.
"Without stabilising the east they'll never come for talks," said one military official.
"They will not go for a war, but they will try to weaken the government - they will kill someone or explode a bomb here and there," he said.
A source close to the Tigers insisted that despite the fighting words their intention was not to resume the war.
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