International truce monitors came under Sri Lankan artillery fire on Sunday as the prepared to open the Maavil Aru sluice gates in a deal clinched by Norwegian Envoy Jon-Hanssen Bauer.

The head of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM), Maj. Gen. Ulf Henricsson and another monitor, Ove Jansen, narrowly escaped with their lives.

In the heaviest bombardment of the past few weeks, Sri Lankan artillery hammered civilian areas in LTTE-controlled parts of Trincomalee, prompting tens of thousands of displaced Tamils to flee towards Vaharai to the south.

“I can’t see anyone getting back to peace talks until a clear change in the balance of power on the ground has been accepted, and likewise with the ceasefire.”

Analysts say the real reasons for the fierce fighting could run deeper than the government’s explanation that it has launched a “humanitarian gesture” aimed at ending the Tamil Tiger blockade of the Maavilaru waterway.

Categorically rejecting the accusation by the Sri Lankan government that Liberation Tigers had abducted and killed Muslim civilians during the fighting in Muthur, the LTTE said Colombo was trying to divert attention from its military setbacks.

Amid reports Sri Lankan troops had shot dead fifteen aid workers in Muttur, the defence ministry in Colombo claimed that the Tigers had massacred at least 100 Muslim men whom they suspected had told security forces about the their movements.

‘Now we cannot trust them’

The Tamil Rehabilitation Organisation (TRO), the largest relief organisation in the Northeast, issued an urgent appeal to the international community after the displacement of tens of thousands of Muslim and Tamil people.

Amid heavy fighting between the Sri Lanka Army and the Liberation Tigers in Trincomalee district, ‘low-intensity’ violence continued in the other Northeast districts also.

A senior commander of the Special Task Force (STF), the elite counter-insurgency arm of the Sri Lankan police, was mortally wounded Monday when his vehicle was ambushed by attackers with a claymore mine.

Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Upul Seneviratne was seriously wounded in the blast at Digana, 10 km southeast of Kandy, around 4:15 a.m. Monday. He succumbed to his wounds at Kandy hospital around 6:20 a.m.

The funeral of cadres of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and a civilian rural force member killed in a Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF) airstrike on the LTTE’s Thenaham Conference Centre in Karadiyanaru, Batticaloa district, was held last Sunday.

The eight had been killed, and another four wounded, on Saturday when the SLAF dropped 12 bombs on the centre in three rounds, completely destroying the LTTE’s flagship political centre in the Batticaloa district.

“The number reaching Tamil Nadu each day is less than a hundred but they continue to come non-stop.”

Tamil side beats the Welsh at the annual cricket match.

It is not illegal to raise the Tamil Eelam flag in the United States, the US embassy in Colombo said last week.

More than two hundred American Tamils from Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka held a protest in the West Front park of US Capitol building Monday August 1, between 12:00 noon and 4:00 p.m. urging the US Government to take action against Colombo for its war crimes against the Northeast Tamils.

The rally also remembered the civilians killed in the Black July 1983 pogrom against Eelam Tamils.