Bomb squad officers defused explosives strapped to a vegetable-laden pushbike at a market in Sri Lanka's capital on Tuesday, hours after US officials said they had arrested suspected rebel arms procurers in a surface-to-air missile sting.
The bomb squad said suspected Tamil Tigers had packed 15 kg of explosives around a Claymore mine, a directional fragmentation weapon often used on the military in recent months. The device was found during a random check in Borella market, overlooking a busy road in eastern Colombo. The find comes after two bomb attacks and an assassination in Colombo this month and after a suspected Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) front threatened to bomb civilian targets.
Sporadic violence continued in the Tamil-dominated north and east, in the fourth week of the worst fighting between government forces and the rebels since a 2002 cease-fire.
The air force said it had bombed an ammunition dump and artillery point just inside Tiger lines. Nordic monitors say the truce is over in all but name. Thousands of residents trapped by the fighting in the besieged northern Jaffna peninsula are waiting for a ship loaded with hundreds of tonnes of aid, which set sail for the Tamil-dominated north on Tuesday evening - a journey expected to take around two-and-a-half days.
US officials said overnight that more than a dozen people had been arrested on suspicion of procuring surface-to-air missiles and raising funds for the Tigers.
Analysts say the Tigers - banned as a terrorist organisation by countries including the United States and India as well as the European Union bloc - have used the past four years of cease-fire to smuggle a lethal arsenal into the country.
Several people who had agreed to pay more than $900,000 for hundreds of AK-47 rifles and 50 to 100 Russian-made surface-to-air missiles were nabbed in a New York sting, according to US court documents.
The Tigers deny any involvement. "We don't have any connection with those people. It is not our way of operating," Tiger military spokesman Rasiah Ilanthiraiyan told Reuters by telephone from the northern rebel stronghold of Kilinochchi.