ABC News
Sri Lanka, Jun 15: A powerful land mine ripped through a packed bus in northern Sri Lanka on Thursday, Jun 15 killing at least 62 people in the worst act of violence since a 2002 cease-fire, the army said. Sri Lanka's air force responded by bombing rebel-held areas in the northeast.
The government blamed the Tamil Tiger rebels for blowing up the bus crowded with commuters and schoolchildren but the rebels strongly denied responsibility.
Thursday's violence came during nearly a year of renewed fighting that began with last summer's assassination of Sri Lanka's foreign minister. With the cease-fire already shaky, the explosion has brought the fractured country even closer to full-scale war.
The explosion tore through a bus in a crowded part of the northern town of Kabithigollewa at around 8 a.m. It was believed to have been caused by a land mine packed with more than 20 pounds of explosives, military spokesman Brig. Prasad Samarasinghe said.
"The blasts hit the middle of the bus and it overturned, trapping passengers," said Bandula Seneviratne, a Sri Lankan photographer who was among the first to reach the scene, about 130 miles northeast of Colombo.
Hours later, the pro-rebel TamilNet Web site said two jets bombed areas in the north of the country, but it provided no other details. Samarasinghe confirmed the bombings, saying the air force was taking limited deterrent action.
Samarasinghe blamed the Tigers for the bus explosion, saying their "motive is to create terror." Police said the victims were primarily ethnic Sinhalese.
A doctor at the hospital where the victims were taken, S.B. Bothota, said 15 schoolchildren were among the 62 killed. Another 78 people were wounded, he said.
But a senior rebel leader countered the accusation by suggesting the attack could be "the work of forces seeking to create ethnic tension between the Sinhalese and the Tamil population."
"The Liberation Tigers condemn the attack on civilians in strongest possible terms," Seevaratnam Puleedevan was quoted as saying by TamilNet.