LTTE Bombs One of Buddhism’s Sacred Places

Tigers attack Temple of the Tooth at dawn

They say that a cornered animal is the most dangerous game – to hunt or play with and yet, there are certain vile acts that even the untamed beasts eschew. No such constraints seemed to apply in several cases of dastardly attacks in the brutal internecine war that passes by the epithet ‘Sri Lanka’s protracted civil war.’

And one of the vilest incidents must surely be the provocative attack on the Sri Dalada Maligawa (Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic).

The background and build up to the unprecedented assault on one of Theravada Buddhism’s holiest shrines makes instructive reading, and may go some way towards explaining how and why even a terrorist group as egregious as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) could resort to so dastardly an act of destruction.

As it transpired, the armed rebels were feeling the heat when the tri-forces launched the massive Operation Jayasikurui (‘Victory Assured’), initially for a strategic six month period in 1997.

It was not very surprising that the LTTE would wish to take the pressure off its cadre in the battlefield and focus some of the nation’s energy elsewhere. And the relatively low security target of the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy – far from the battlefield – was too tempting.

And it was also a supremely tactical choice. Kandy was three provinces away from the focus of national security where an election in the north was scheduled for 28 January in Jaffna, after a hiatus of 16 years.

The Central Province city – far removed from the North and North-Central Provinces where the war raged – would only come into the limelight the next month when Charles, Prince of Wales, and several foreign dignitaries would grace its capital city.

On 25 January, the LTTE exploded a massive bomb in the precincts of the holy place after three of its ‘Black Tigers’ (the suicide squad) drove an explosives laden truck along city streets, firing at the military on guard duty there.

In the attacks and blast (the bomb was massive at an estimated 300-400 kilos of explosive), 16 people including the three attackers and a two-year-old were killed, while 25 including four women, a monk and a policemen were wounded. Glass panes within a radius of five kilometres were shattered.

The reverberations from the unprecedented attack echoed farther and wider in the outraged courts of public opinion.

The LTTE exploded a massive bomb in the precincts of the holy place after three of its ‘Black Tigers’ (the suicide squad) drove an explosives laden truck along city streets