Sri Lanka's military said on Thursday gunmen who appeared to be Tamil Tiger rebels charged into a village firing wildly, killing six women and one man. "They were firing indiscriminately and, due to that, there were seven civilians killed," said Lieutenant Colonel Upali Rajapakse, spokesman for the media centre for national security.
Villagers were able to identify the shooters as Tamil Tigers by their uniforms, he said, and the incident was part of a campaign to target civilians that included two claymore mine attacks on public buses in the past 10 days in the same area, the restive district of Vavuniya.
The Tigers could not be reached for comment on the latest incident, but have denied responsibility for the bus bombings, asserting that the government was behind them in a bid to harm the Tigers' image.
Since 1983, about 68,000 people have died in fighting between government and rebels, known officially as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The Tigers are fighting to create an independent state for ethnic minority Tamils in Sri Lanka's north and east.