‘Inside Job’ Suspected in Sri Lanka Attack; Parliament Workers Are Questioned

Authorities questioned Sri Lankan parliamentary employees Wednesday about possible inside involvement in a grenade and pistol attack in which a member of Parliament was killed.

Five employees, including a security officer, were detained for questioning in the attack, which took place Tuesday in a committee room of the Parliament building.

“It was an inside job,” Finance Minister Ronnie De Mel said Wednesday.

An assassin, or assassins, hiding in an adjoining storage room threw hand grenades into the meeting room and opened fire with a hand gun. Kirthi Abeywickreme, the district minister for the southern Matara region, was killed and 15 people were wounded.

President Junius R. Jayewardene was not injured, although one of the grenades hit the table directly in front of him and bounced away.

An official spokesman, Sarath Amunagama, said the president was saved from a gunshot wound when a bullet aimed in his direction hit a clerk who walked into the line of fire.

Authorities suspect that employees were involved, Amunagama said, because the assassins were able to penetrate the heavy security around the building, in Kotte, 10 miles outside Colombo. He said the gun used in the attack has not been recovered.

Privately, senior government officials expressed fear that the staff of 800 people, and perhaps the security staff itself, has been infiltrated by a terrorist organization opposed to an agreement signed July 29 by Jayewardene and Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

The agreement, which brought a peacekeeping force of 7,000 Indian soldiers to Sri Lanka, is aimed at ending the Sri Lankan government’s war with Tamil separatists.

Attacked by Sinhalese

The agreement has been attacked by several organizations representing the majority Sinhalese Buddhists for granting what they feel are too many concessions to the Tamils, who make up about 18% of the population and complain that they are discriminated against by the Sinhalese.

The Tamils, mostly Hindu, are concentrated in the north and northeast of the island.

Jayewardene blamed Tuesday’s attack on “terrorists in the south,” referring to the area populated largely by Sinhalese Buddhists.

The most active Sinhalese militant organization in the south is the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or JVP, also known as the People’s Liberation Front. The JVP is an outlawed political party that began in the 1960s as a left-wing revolutionary organization. Several thousand of its members were killed in a government crackdown in 1971, and the JVP has since become a leading voice for Sinhalese interests.

One of the JVP’s main organizing ploys has been to encourage “patriotic members” of the police and the armed forces to rebel against the government on behalf of the Sinhalese “motherland.”

However, the group that assumed responsibility for Tuesday’s attack said in a telephone call to the local correspondent of the British Broadcasting Corp. that it is not affiliated with the JVP.

The anonymous caller told the BBC man, John Retty, that the attack was carried out by the Patriotic People’s Movement in order to protest the Jayewardene-Gandhi agreement. The caller said his group is a two-year-old organization with 5,000 members, a “separate movement from the JVP,” though its ranks include some who are members of both organizations.

Retty quoted the caller as saying that the Jayewardene-Gandhi agreement was a “betrayal of the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Sri Lanka” and that such attacks will continue “until the peace agreement is abrogated and the India army is sent back.”

He said the caller also said that his group was behind the July 29 attack on Prime Minister Gandhi by a member of a Sri Lanka naval honor guard. As Gandhi reviewed the guard, one of the sailors raised his rifle and aimed a blow at the prime minister’s head. Gandhi ducked away and was not seriously injured.

Wednesday afternoon, hundreds of pamphlets, written in the Sinhalese language and bearing the imprint of the Patriotic People’s Movement, were dropped in crowded areas of the city.

The pamphlet calls on the armed forces to rise against the government and “Indian expansionism.” It accuses Gandhi and Jayewardene of conspiring to divide the country, apparently a reference to a section of the agreement that provides for a majority Tamil province with limited autonomy.

It attacks Gandhi and India for aiding the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the main Tamil separatist organization, and goes on to say: “The traitor Jayewardene has decided one-third of our country should be handed over to Rajiv Gandhi through the hands of the murderer Prabhakaran (Tamil Tiger commander Velupillai Prabhakaran). No patriot who loves his country can remain silent to this. Therefore, we have decided to fight with our lives.”

Ironically, most of those injured in Tuesday’s attack were Cabinet ministers and members of Parliament who opposed the agreement with Gandhi, including Prime Minister Ranasinghe Premadasa.

Premadasa was only slightly injured, but National Security Minister Lalith Athulathmudali, who directed the government campaign against the Tamil separatists, was in stable condition after his spleen was removed because of wounds.

Despite the attack, Sri Lankan and Indian officials met Wednesday to discuss details of the agreement. “We intend to carry on our work irrespective of the evil forces that are ganging up against us,” Jayewardene said.