'Pregnant' Suicide Bomber Strikes Military HQ

Courtesy Of: Times Online
By Richard Beeston,
Diplomatic Editor
April 26, 2006

Sri Lanka was sliding back into civil war yesterday, after the military launched air strikes and shelled rebel Tamil positions in retaliation for a suicide attack that left the country's top army officer badly injured.

There were fears that the island's uneasy four-year ceasefire was unravelling and that simmering ethnic conflict could reignite into the sort of all-out war that raged in the 1980s and 1990s.

The bloody sequence of events was triggered yesterday morning when a suspected member of the Black Tigers Suicide Squad penetrated the heavily fortified Sri Lankan Military Headquarters in Colombo.

Posing as a pregnant woman and showing forged identity documents, the Tamil bomber concealed explosives around her waist and set off her device next to a car carrying Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka, the recently appointed Army Chief of Staff.

Witnesses reported seeing a "fireball" as the explosion ripped through the compound, leaving a circle of dead and wounded.


MASTERS OF THE HUMAN BOMB:
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The Tamil Tigers were not the first to use the human bomb, but they perfected the art and were the first to celebrate bombers as heroes in the way that Japan did its Kamikazi pilots.

The first suicide attack was a 1987 truck bombing in an army camp that killed 40 troops.

It has since been estimated that the Tigers have been responsible for a quarter of all the world's suicide attacks in the 25 years before the last Iraq War.

The complete article can be read at:
http://timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2151783,00.html