Sri Lanka shelling kills 64 civilians, rebels say

COLOMBO, SRI LANKA — Sri Lankan forces shelled a makeshift hospital in the war zone Saturday, killing 64 civilians despite a pledge to stop using heavy weapons in its battle with the Tamil Tigers, a rebel-linked website said.

A health official in the war zone confirmed that the hospital was hit twice by artillery through the day, but said he did not know who was responsible. The military denied launching the attack.

The government has come under increasing international pressure to halt its offensive against the rebels to reduce the risk to the estimated 50,000 ethnic Tamil civilians trapped by the fighting.

The Sri Lankan government, which has cornered the Tamil Tigers in a 3-mile-long coastal strip, has refused, but it did promise to stop launching artillery and airstrikes into the area.

The TamilNet website said the government hit the makeshift hospital at Mullivaaykkaal twice Saturday morning.

The attacks killed at least 64 patients and bystanders and wounded 87, the government health official said. The official, who said he was not certain of the source of the attack, declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.

Although the hospital is inside rebel-held territory, it is run by government doctors.

Government forces have ousted the rebels from their northern strongholds and appear on the verge of ending the nation’s quarter-century civil war.

The Tamil Tigers, labeled a terrorist group by many Western nations, have been fighting since 1983 for an ethnic Tamil state in the north and east after decades of what they call unfair treatment by governments dominated by the Sinhalese majority.