A Sri Lankan government minister died Tuesday in a roadside bombing blamed on the Tamil Tiger rebels, the first assassination of a top Sri Lankan official in 19 months.

A Sri Lankan soldier guards the site of Tuesday's explosion in Ja-Ela, which killed Nation Building Minister D.M. Dassanayake.
(Eranga Jayawardena/ Associated Press)

The attack threatened to intensify the civil war between government forces and rebel fighters that has been raging across northern Sri Lanka in recent months.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa condemned the assassination as an example of the rebel group's "continued commitment to terror and violence," and implied the government would retaliate.

"This sad event is a further reminder of the need to redouble our efforts to rid our country of terrorism and the use of violence to achieve political ends," he said in a statement.

The bomb tore through the car carrying Nation Building Minister D.M. Dassanayake as he travelled through the Ja-Ela area, about 12 kilometres north of the capital of Colombo.

Dassanayake, who was not a member of cabinet, suffered head injuries and wounds all over his body and was rushed into surgery before he died, said Dr. Dharmawardena Guruge, a physician at Ragama Teaching Hospital, where the minister was taken.

2nd man killed, 10 wounded

The blast, which came just days after the government officially pulled out of a tattered ceasefire with the separatist rebels, killed another man and wounded 10 others, officials said.

"We are quite sure that it was done by the terrorists," Media Minister Anura Yapa said, referring to the Tamil Tigers.

Tamil Tiger spokesman Rasiah Ilanthirayan did not answer calls seeking comment.

Dassanayake was co-ordinating efforts to rebuild Sri Lanka's Eastern Province after government forces drove the rebels from the area in July. Rajapaksa suggested Dissanayaka was killed because his work in the east angered the rebels.

Dassanayake's death came just two days after a top rebel intelligence officer, Shanmuganathan Ravishankar, also known as Col. Charles, was killed in a military strike. Ravishankar was in charge of the rebels' ground troop intelligence, according to pro-rebel reports.

The rebels have routinely targetted government ministers and senior military officials for assassination.

A suicide bomber killed an aide to Social Services Minister Douglas Devananda in November in a failed assassination that was recorded by security cameras. Bombing attacks in 2006 also failed to kill Army Commander Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka and Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, the president's brother.

The last successful assassination took place in June 2006, when the rebels killed Maj. Gen. Parami Kulatunga, the country's third-highest-ranking military officer.

Cabinet withdrew from 2002 truce

The rebels have been blamed for an increase in attacks in the Colombo area in recent months.

On Wednesday, suspected rebels set off a bomb near a bus transporting wounded soldiers through the heart of the capital. The blast killed four people — a soldier and three civilian bystanders.

Soon after, Sri Lanka's cabinet decided to officially withdraw from a 2002 truce that had all but collapsed over the past two years as escalating violence killed about 5,000 people.

Fighting continued in the embattled north Tuesday, with troops killing 10 rebels in two separate clashes along the front lines in the Vavuniya district, said a Defence Ministry statement. There was no immediate comment from the rebels. Each side routinely exaggerates the other's casualties and plays down its own.

A new wave of fighting in the north has killed 98 people — 94 rebels and four soldiers — in the five days since the withdrawal, according to the military.

More than 70,000 people have been killed since the rebels began fighting in 1983 for an independent state for Sri Lanka's ethnic Tamil minority, claiming discrimination by the Sinhalese majority.