Roadside blasts kill 13 as Sri Lanka fetes anniversary

By Simon Gardner

COLOMBO (Reuters) - Suspected Tamil Tiger rebels killed 13 people with two roadside bombs on Monday, just hours after the government celebrated the island's 60th anniversary of independence with a parade of military might in the capital.

At least a dozen people were killed and 17 hospitalised in a suspected rebel bombing of a civilian bus in the north-eastern town of Weli-Oya.

A soldier also died and three others wounded when their army tractor was blown up by a bomb near the southeastern town of Buttala, officials said.

They were the latest in a series of deadly attacks as a 25-year civil war between the state and separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam escalates.

"It was a Tamil Tiger Claymore mine targeting a civilian bus in Weli-Oya," a military spokesman said of the attack in the north-eastern district of Polonnaruwa, about 200 km from Colombo.

Thousands of police and troops were on high alert in the capital Colombo earlier on Monday as a defiant Sri Lankan military paraded tanks and troops as fighter jets flew overhead amid fears Tiger rebels would attack the celebrations.

The parade came a day after a suspected female Tiger suicide bomber killed 11 people and wounded 92 in an attack on the island's main train station, which sits a few hundred metres from the site of Monday's parade.

On Saturday, a bomb exploded on a civilian bus in the central town of Dambulla, killing at least 18 people and wounding 50, the military said.