Unidentified gunmen shot dead Saturday a top Sri Lankan official involved in the Norwegian-led peace process with Tamil Tiger rebels, police said. Ketheesh Loganathan, the Deputy Secretary-General of the Peace Secretariat, was shot at his home in Colombo's Dehiwala suburb, police said, adding that he was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital.
The assassination came as government troops and Tamil Tiger rebels were locked in fierce combat in the island's north-east despite a truce that has been nominally in place since 2002.
Loganathan, a former member of a Tamil militant group, had become a journalist and a peace researcher before taking up the number two position at the Peace Secretariat which is directly under President Mahinda Rajapakse.
He was a former member of the Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF), a left-leaning political party originally founded as a militant Tamil group.
The EPRLF is bitterly opposed by the main rebel group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which repudiated a 1987 peace pact and continued the fight for an independent Tamil state in the north-east of the island.
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