COLOMBO: Tamil rebels have shot and hacked to death 20 villagers, including women and children, in the past two days, Sri Lankan military officials said on Tuesday.
Military sources said about six guerrillas from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) killed three farmers working on paddy fields at Kivulakada in Trincomalee district, east Sri Lanka, just past noon on Tuesday.
At about the same time, a second group of rebels shot dead four people, including an infant, in a house in the same village.
The dead were all Sinhalese the majority community which dominates Sri Lanka’s government.
ISLAMABAD: The leader of the main Moslem guerrilla alliance fighting the Soviet backed Afghan government resigned amid a deadlock in U.N sponsored Afghan talks in Geneva. The Western backed alliance, » based in Pakistan, said 69yearold Mohammad Younis Khalis had resigned because of health problems. The decision emerged from a meeting in Islamabad of its supreme council.
ISLAMABAD: Afghan President Najibullah renewed on Monday his offer of talks with anti-Communist guerrillas on the formation of a coalition government.
But, in an interview broadcast by the official Kabul radio, he again rejected Pakistan’s demand for a transitional government to oversee the withdrawal of Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
He said his government was “ready to sit at a table for talks on a board based coalition government with any of the opponents, at any level and at any time and…With the representatives of refugees either in Afghanistan or abroad”.
He said, however: “The people and state of Afghanistan will never agree to a government formed abroad at the recommendation of others and exported to Afghanistan.
Article extracted from this publication >> March 18, 1988
