Lanka Army deployed after murder

Combat-ready soldiers patrolled the streets of the Tamil-majority town of Batticaloa today, a day after unidentified gunmen killed a Tamil c...

Combat-ready soldiers patrolled the streets of the Tamil-majority town of Batticaloa today, a day after unidentified gunmen killed a Tamil candidate in this week’s parliamentary elections who was allied to a renegade guerrilla leader.

Soldiers fanned out across this eastern town, where Rajan Sathiyamoorthy of the Tamil National Alliance party was shot dead yesterday, along with a relative. Sathiyamoorthy had supported breakaway Tiger leader Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, and it’s widely believed that seven of the eight TNA candidates running in Batticaloa also support him. Many of them have complained of anonymous telephone threats warning them to withdraw from the election, said a police official.

In Colombo today, Sri Lanka’s private election monitors expressed fears that Tamil Tiger rebels and their allies could rig elections in the northern peninsula of Jaffna after blocking rivals from campaigning there, even as analysts predicted a hung parliament.

Citing the killing of five people in campaign related violence, the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV) said the situation in rebel-held areas was unsatisfactory. ‘‘In the North, we are extremely disturbed by reports that the Tamil National Alliance supported by the LTTE has made it virtually impossible for other Tamil parties and groups to carry on with a campaign,’’ the CMEV said in its interim report.

The Tigers have also used strong-arm tactics to intimidate civilians and prevent supporters actively engaging in electioneering in favour of rivals, particularly in Jaffna, it said. ‘‘We are most worried about irregularities in Jaffna on polling day,’’ CMEV spokeswoman Sunila Abeysekera said adding ‘‘it is possible even the monitors could be intimidated there.’’ Meanwhile, an opinion poll on Wednesday showed President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s United People’s Freedom Alliance winning 101 seats in the 225-seat parliament, marginally ahead of PM Ranil Wickremesinghe’s United National Party and its coalition partners with 99.