COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s main Tamil party yesterday accused a pro-government mob of attacking them in the island’s north as racial tensions rose after Buddhist extremists smashed a Muslim-owned business.
The opposition Tamil National Alliance (TNA) said their meeting in the town of Kilinochchi on Saturday was disrupted by a stone-throwing mob which had also attacked their vehicles and damaged a building while police looked on.
“Although there were police officers at that place... they took no effort to quell this attack,” the TNA said in a statement. TNA legislators have been provided with policemen as their bodyguards.
The latest violence came two days after a mob targeted a Muslim-owned clothing store and warehouse just outside Colombo, raising religious tensions in a country emerging from nearly four decades of ethnic war.
Military spokesman Ruwan Wanigasooriya denied security forces were involved in the attack and said police “successfully dispersed the crowd within about an hour, thus preventing the situation from escalating”.
The attack at Kilinochchi, 330km north of Colombo, came despite increased security after Thursday’s violence. The main Muslim party in the ruling coalition said the unprovoked attack was a “sequel” to an ongoing hate campaign against minority Muslims and other religious minorities.
Muslims, who constitute about 10 percent of the country’s 20 million population, are the second largest minority after the mainly Hindu ethnic Tamils. Seventy percent of the population are Sinhalese, most of whom are Buddhists.
AFP
