LONDON: More than 20,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the final days of Sri Lanka’s military operation to eliminate the Tamil Tigers, a British newspaper reported. Sri Lanka’s authorities say their forces stopped using heavy weapons on April 27 in a no-fire zone where an estimated 100,000 Tamil civilians were sheltered and blame civilian casualties on rebels hiding among the civilians, the London-based paper said. Citing confidential UN documents it acquired, the daily said the civilian death toll in the no-fire zone soared from late April, with around 1,000 civilians killed daily until May 19. That was the day after Vellupillai Prabhakaran, leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), was killed. The final civilian death toll could be more than 20,000, said the paper. That figure is three times the official count. In fact, ‘‘higher’’, a UN source was quoted as saying by the paper. ‘‘Keep going.’’
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
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