COLOMBO, Aug 13: Sri Lanka declared a state of emergency on Saturday after the assassination of Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar in an attack blamed by police on Tamil rebels that threatens to undermine the peace process.

President Chandrika Kumaratunga appealed for calm as officials immediately accused the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of the shooting of the 73-year-old minister, a vociferous critic of the Tigers.

“From the style and weapons used we’re convinced it’s the work of the Tigers,” police chief Chandra Fernando said. “It’s definitely the work of the LTTE.”

The Tigers, who have waged a three-decade campaign for a separate homeland denied any involvement, but the government said the statement was hard to believe.

“The LTTE has denied any involvement, but we find it difficult to accept that denial,” government spokesman Nimal Siripala de Silva told reporters in Colombo.

The assassination further imperilled a three-year-old ceasefire already rocked by a spike in violence in recent months.

The head of the government’s peace secretariat, Jayantha Dhanapala, called the killing “a grave setback to the peace process” and said restarting talks which have been on hold since April 2003 would be “seriously undermined.”

Scandinavian truce monitors also condemned the killing and said it was a “huge blow” to the peace initiative.

The rebels had branded Kadirgamar, a member of the minority Tamil community, a traitor to their cause of setting up a homeland for mainly Hindu Tamils within Sri Lanka, which is mainly Buddhist and Sinhalese.

Authorities had viewed Kadirgamar, who spearheaded a campaign which led to the Tigers being outlawed abroad, including in the US and Britain, as a prime assassination target for the Tigers.

But the rebels said forces within the government were trying to sabotage the Norwegian-arranged truce by resorting to violence and blaming them.—AFP