COLOMBO, February 7: The suicide bomber who killed nine people at a checkpoint in the capital on Friday has been identified as a Tamil woman who was living in an LTTE- controlled part of the eastern Batticalao district, official sources said on Saturday.Police have established from a government-issued national identity card that was found at the site of blast that the 25-year-old woman was a resident of Vakkarai, 60 km north of Batticalao town, which is at present being held by the LTTE. Sources said the police believed the identity card to be authentic.
Investigators now believe that the woman may have been a pedestrian contrary to the earlier theory that she was travelling in a van was stopped at the checkpoint.
Eight people, five of them security personnel, were killed when the woman detonated herself at the checkpoint. While she too was killed in the blast three men in the van also died in the explosion.
Earlier, police said the woman had alighted from the van and grabbed a woman soldier checkingher as she blasted herself. But from the identity cards of men in the van -- Tamil employees of a cloth merchant in the capital -- it is now believed that they may not have had any connection with the woman. Police are now working on the theory that she walked up to the checkpoint at the same time as the van was stopped.
Officials said the woman apparently belonged to the LTTE's black tiger suicide squad, which had been described by rebel supremo V Prabhakaran as the "protective armour" of the Tamil people in their campaign.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
