Sri Lanka's ruling alliance won crucial elections in the island's war-ravaged east and hailed the result on Sunday as an endorsement of its war to defeat Tamil Tiger rebels. But election monitors and the opposition said the poll was marred by cheating, with armed former rebels now backed by the government accused of intimidating voters.
The council elections, the first in the ethnically-mixed region for two decades, took place against a backdrop of violence blamed on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who are fighting for an independent state in the north and east. A "Black Tiger" suicide squad sank a naval ship in the eastern port of Trincomalee hours before the polls opened on Saturday. A day earlier a bomb in a crowded cafe in eastern Sri Lanka had killed 12 people and injured 29. "It is a clear mandate against terrorism," Keheliya Rambuwella, a government minister and defence spokesman, told Reuters soon after the election results were released.
"We have liberated the east from the clutches of LTTE, then we have given them the economic liberation and now political liberation, now the power is in the hands of people."