A Sri Lankan minister was killed by a roadside bomb planted by suspected Tamil Tiger rebels north of the capital on Tuesday, a senior hospital official said, the second MP killed in a week as a protracted civil war escalates.
Nation Building Minister D.M. Dassanayake, whose vehicle was hit by the blast in the town of Ja-Ela, 12 miles (19 km) north of Colombo on the road to the island's only international airport, died on the operating table.
"He died a short while ago," said Lalini Gurusinghe, deputy director of the government teaching hospital in the town of Ragama, where the minister and 10 others wounded in the blast were taken. One of his security detail also later died.
Local television broadcast footage of the minister's Toyota Land Cruiser, its windows shattered, sides peppered with shrapnel sprayed by the Claymore fragmentation mine and blood smeared on a rear passenger door and in a pool on the ground.
A doctor was pictured sitting astride the minister on a trolley, pumping his chest as he was rushed to the operating theatre.
WAR ESCALATES
The bombing is the latest in a series of attacks on government officials and the military in recent months. It comes just days after the government said it was formally scrapping a tattered ceasefire which had degenerated into renewed civil war in early 2006.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who want to carve out an independent state in north and east Sri Lanka, were not immediately available for comment, but routinely deny involvement in such attacks.
