Sri Lankan troops have killed at least three Tamil Tiger rebels when they attacked a naval base in the southern city of Galle on Wednesday, a naval spokesman said.
"They came in three boats and we blew up all three of them. Two small crafts of the navy were damaged in the fighting," the spokesman said.
The attack on the navy is the second in three days. Nearly 100 people, mostly sailors, were killed when a Tiger rebel detonated a bomb killing himself and those on a naval convoy in a north-central district on Monday.
Attacks have been spreading throughout the country far from the northern and eastern Tamil strongholds where much of the violence has been concentrated. Galle is located about 113 km south of the capital, Colombo.
The raid came a day after the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) reiterated their commitment to planned peace talks in Geneva on October 28 and 29.
Few expect the talks to achieve a breakthrough in the face of continued fighting and deep distrust. Hundreds of people have been killed in spiralling violence since late July that shattered a truce brokered in 2002.
The ongoing fighting has left thousands of Sri Lankans displaced and living in camps afraid to go home as fighting has continued on the island.
Last week, dozens of troops and rebels were killed and hundreds wounded in one of the deadliest battles since the truce.
The Sri Lankan authorities will exhume today the bodies of 15 aid workers who were massacred in the northeast of the country in August to try to establish who killed them, their French employer said on Saturday.
The 15 were among 17 mainly Tamils who worked for Paris-based voluntary group Action Contre la Faim (ACF) and were found killed execution-style in their office compound in Muttur town after a battle in the area between the army and Tamil Tiger rebels.
The ACF statement said on Saturday: "The bodies should be transferred to Colombo the same day ... Australian experts are expected in Colombo next week to be present at the post mortem, principally as advisers and observers."
Nordic monitors of the tattered truce between the Sri Lankan army and Tamil Tiger rebels have formally accused government soldiers of being behind the Muttur killings.
The government has said that an earlier autopsy was inconclusive, and denies it was involved in the killings. Officials have accused the monitors of being biased in favour of the rebels. The inquest began in Muttur, but has since been transferred twice.
The killing of the aid workers has been widely condemned and is seen as the worst attack on humanitarian workers since a bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003 in which 22 UN staff were killed.
More than 65,000 people have been killed since 1983 when the rebels began fighting for an independent Tamil homeland.
Reuters
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