Lanka revisits history as Sinhalese hooligans lynch 25 Tamil imates

“He said the body of the 25th man killed was yet to be identified. It was not immediately clear if he was one of the men involved in the attack on the centre at Bandarawela, 210 kilometres (131 miles) east of here.

“The mobs attacked these people and later set fire to the entire place,” a police officer said after visiting the scene. He said police had been deployed in the area. State radio said the inmates had tried to take over the facility on Tuesday triggering tension and the Army had been called in to restore order.

However, a Defence ministry spokesman here, Sanath Karunaratne, said troops sent to the centre had withdrawn around midnight but rioting had broken out again on Wednesday morning. “We have sent another platoon this morning, but by the time our troops got there, it was all over,” Karunaratne said.

Police sources said it seemed the inmates clashed with their minders and later hundreds of residents armed with knives and sticks came to the aide of the Army captain in charge. The wounded were being treated at three hospitals under tight security.

The Tamil detainees, who were being provided with vocational training at the centre, were not hard core Tiger rebels, according to officials here. They said the facility was maintained under a civilian authority, the National Youth Services Council, to provide vocational training to former rebels who had surrendered to security forces. “These are people who had actually given themselves up to security forces and were being taught some trade or the other so that they could go back to society as free men,” a military official here said.

The attack was reminiscent of a massacre of dozens of Tamil prisoners at a maximum security prison in Colombo in July 1983 when Sinhalese mobs attacked members of the minority community.