Gunmen posing as police kill 2 Red Cross workers in Sri Lanka

0 Comments | Asian Political News, June 4, 2007

COLOMBO, June 3 Kyodo

Two Red Cross workers were killed in Sri Lanka shortly after they were seized Friday by gunmen claiming to be plainclothes police, the charity said Sunday.

The two local employees of the Sri Lanka Red Cross were from the minority Tamil community and they were taken away from the main railway station at Colombo Fort on Friday evening, a spokesman for the Red Cross said.

He said the two men were in a group of six aid workers who were at the station waiting for a train to return to the eastern town of Batticaloa, 300 kilometers east of the capital.

The gunmen questioned them and took away two of the six.

''The men had shown ID cards to say that they were from the police,'' Red Cross chief Neville Nanayakkara said.

He added the Red Cross was alerted only when they saw a television station broadcast pictures of two unidentified bodies.

The killing of the two men is the worst attack on aid workers since unidentified gunmen killed 17 employees of the French charity ACF in August last year.

Truce monitors said the killings were the work of the security forces, a charge vehemently denied by the government.

The latest killings came a week after the government entered into an agreement with aid agencies to ensure their safety and security.

The murders also took place on the same day that President Mahinda Rajapakse met with relatives of more than 100 people who had gone missing in recent times.

Human rights groups have said that more than 700 people have ''disappeared'' or been extra-judicially killed in the past year.

The government maintains the reports are ''exaggerated.''

The latest murders come as the authorities step up a crackdown on minority Tamils in Colombo after two bomb attacks last week blamed on Tamil Tiger rebels killed nine and wounded 44.

The two Red Cross workers had arrived in the city to attend a tsunami-related workshop and were on their way back to their home base in Batticaloa when they were abducted.