NEW DELHI, India -- Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger guerrillas said Saturday they had no role in the assassination of the island nation's president, Ranasinghe Premadasa.
'We are not involved in this...This assassination is not our work,' a London-based spokesman of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam told United Press International by telephone.
Premadasa, 69, was killed Saturday by a suicide bomber while leading a May Day procession in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital. Police in Colombo said they suspected the involvement of the LTTE in the assassination.
The slaying came just days after Premadasa's main political opponent, Lalith W. Athulathmudali, was assassinated.
Governing party members blamed the Tamil Tigers for Athulathmudali's assassination, but the slain politician's followers claimed the president was behind the killing.
A LTTE spokesman said his organization was not involved in either assassination.
Premadasa spearheaded a major military offensive against the Tamil Tigers. Athulathmudali, as national security minister under former President Junius R. Jayewardene, coordinated a major military campaign against the Tigers.
Premadasa became president in 1989 after outmaneuvering his two principal rivals in the ruling United National Party, Athulathmudali and Gammini Dissanayake.
Athulathmudali served in Premadasa's Cabinet but rebelled and sponsored an unsuccessful impeachment motion in Parliament against him. During Athulathmudali's funeral last Wednesday, mourners carried placards saying, 'Premadasa is a Murderer.'
Once the self-proclaimed 'island of paradise,' Sri Lanka turned into an island of blood in 1992 under Premadasa's government. Armed with emergency powers, the government let loose gun-toting party activists, militiamen and police on young leftist rebels belonging to the majority Sinhalese community.
Almost overnight, bodies of hundreds of slain youths appeared in public. Months later, some 40,000 youths are still reported missing, according to local and international human-rights groups.
The LTTE is one of the world's best organized and trained guerrilla groups. Its members have carried out many suicide attacks that have been openly acknowledged by the organization.
The Tigers, who control much of Sri Lanka's northern Jaffna peninsula and parts of the Eastern Province, have been waging a bloody guerrilla campaign for the past one decade for an independent homeland for the island's 2.5 million minority Tamils.
Sri Lanka's armed secessionist movement began after hundreds of minority members were slain in the 1983 anti-Tamil riots in Colombo and elsewhere on the island.
The Tamils claim widespread discrimination by the Sinhalese majority, which dominates the Sri Lankan government and military.
India, which has 55 million Tamil citizens who sympathize with the cause of Sri Lanka's ethnic minority, originally aided the Tamil Tigers but later turned openly hostile toward the group.
Tiger chief Vellupillai Prabhakaran has been charged by New Delhi with involvement in the 1991 assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was killed by a female suicide bomber in Tamil Nadu state.
The Indian government has sought Sri Lanka's help in extraditing Prabhakaran to face trial in the Gandhi slaying case even though the island's military has tried unsuccessfully for nearly one decade to capture the Tamil guerrilla chief.
New Delhi claims Prabhakaran masterminded the Gandhi killing to avenge the 1987 Indian military intervention in Sri Lanka. The operation, carried out on behalf of President Jayewardene's government Colombo, failed to crush the Tamil separatist rebellion.
Several hundred Indian soldiers perished in the operation, which many analysts call 'India's Vietnam.' Premadasa was a major Sri Lankan critic of the operation.
The Indian government last year outlawed the LTTE -- an action that invited ridicule from some opposition politicians who questioned how an organization based overseas could be banned.
