4TH LEAD (UPDATE, ADDS PHOTOS)

Five civilians shot and killed by SLA soldiers in Puthur East, Jaffna

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 19 April 2006, 03:11 GMT]
Sri Lanka Army (SLA) soldiers shot and killed five Tamil civilians Tuesday night close to an SLA 51-1 Division camp located at Vatharavathai, 13 km north-east of Jaffna. The soldiers took the five civilians, a Municipal Council official, an electrical mechanic, a farmer and two auto-rikshaw drivers, into their camp and later brought them out to an open terrain and gunned them down, villagers said. A terror-campaign, let loose on the civilians in Puthur in October 2005, when the villagers spoiled a rape attempt by the soldiers, triggered a series of Claymore attacks in Jaffna. Tuesday's killings come a few hours after Australia commending Colombo for "not retaliating in kind."



Four villagers, on their way in an auto-rikshaw, after transporting an ill relative to his home, were stopped by the soldiers and taken into the SLA camp Tuesday around 8:30 p.m.

Another rikshaw driver, who went searching for the missing persons, was also stopped by the soldiers.

The five civilians were shot and killed by the SLA men in the tharavai area, an open terrain, near the SLA camp.

The civilians killed were identified as Kandasamy Gowribalan, 32, a Municipal Council official, Balasubramaniam Kannathasan, 27, Sellappu Kamalathasan, 25, an electrical mechanic, Mahadevan Kishokumar, 20, a farmer and Thangarajah Raveendran, 27, the other auto-rikshaw driver who went searching for the missing persons.

Three dead bodies were found together and the other two were found 200 meters away by the villagers Wednesday morning.

Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) officials visited the massacre site.

Tension prevails in Puthur.