Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister Slain; Guerrillas Suspected

Sri Lanka’s foreign minister, a member of the ethnic Tamil minority who led an international campaign to ban the Tamil Tiger rebels as a terrorist organization, was assassinated at his home Friday. The military blamed the rebels.

Lakshman Kadirgamar, 73, was shot in the head and heart and died at National Hospital.

“The minister had just returned from a swim and was getting inside his home when he was shot,” said Chandra Fernando, inspector general of police. He said two snipers had been hiding in buildings near Kadirgamar’s heavily guarded home in the diplomatic district of the capital, Colombo.

Authorities began house-to-house searches in the area and made two arrests at a neighboring residence.

President Chandrika Kumaratunga declared a state of emergency today. As dawn broke, dozens of military trucks moved in and soldiers were seen taking positions at important intersections in the capital.

The emergency law, used at the height of the conflict between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, allows authorities to detain without trial anybody suspected of involvement in terrorist activities.

Brig. Daya Ratnayake said that in the last week police had arrested two Tamil men who were videotaping the area.

Rebel attacks against Sri Lankan political leaders were once common. Kumaratunga, who rushed to the hospital after the shooting, was gravely wounded in a 1999 assassination attempt. Police blamed rebels for that assault, which killed about two dozen people.

Such high-level attacks stopped after a February 2002 cease-fire, but tensions between the government and the rebels have been growing. There has been a surge of attacks in the volatile eastern region, occasionally spilling over into the capital.

“This senseless murder was a vicious act of terror, which the United States strongly condemns,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said of the foreign minister’s slaying. “Those responsible must be brought to justice.”

Rice urged Sri Lankans not to let the assassination lead to a resumption of the civil war.

Elite policemen and soldiers cordoned the area around Kadirgamar’s home, and the air force deployed helicopters to search for the assailants.

The Tamil Tigers began fighting in 1983 for a separate homeland for ethnic Tamils in the country’s north and east, claiming discrimination by the majority Sinhalese. The conflict killed nearly 65,000 people before a cease-fire brokered by Norway.

Post-truce peace talks have been stalled since 2003 over rebel demands for wide autonomy in this country of 20 million people. An island about the size of West Virginia, Sri Lanka is less than 20 miles from the coast of India.