COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Hundreds of Muslim families are fleeing their homes in eastern Sri Lanka amid fears of a Tamil Tiger rebel assault to reclaim territory taken by government forces in recent fighting, a local government leader said Saturday.
The chairman of the government in the coastal town of Mutur, who goes by the single name Thoufeek, said 700 to 800 families — about 10 percent of the population — left on Friday and Saturday after the Tamil Tiger separatists warned that they were planning an offensive.
Many of Mutur's residents, who are mostly Muslims, only returned to their homes two weeks ago from refugee camps. They had been driven from the town by weeks of heavy fighting and artillery assaults in August that killed dozens of civilians.
Clashes between government troops and rebels have killed at least 1,000 combatants and more than 100 civilians since July. Foreign mediators are struggling to keep alive a 2002 cease-fire that ended a nearly two-decade-long civil war.
The rebels had been fighting for a separate homeland in the north and east for Sri Lanka's Tamil population, the country's largest ethnic minority. The Tamils, who are mostly Hindu, claimed discrimination from the majority Sinhalese, who are Buddhist.
The Tigers also have a long history of hostility toward the Muslims, Sri Lanka's second largest minority group. In August 1990, rebels killed 130 Muslims at two mosques on the same day.
On Friday, hundreds of people boarded boats in Mutur, about 140 miles east of the capital, and sailed for the nearby Muslim-majority island of Kinniyai, Thoufeek said in a telephone interview. Government forces refused to let them pass by road, said Thoufeek, who also heads the regional Muslim Council.
Many had reluctantly returned home in time for the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan which begins Sunday in Sri Lanka. Some 8,000 Muslim families live in the area.
Witnesses said the roadblocks were removed Saturday after meetings between the government and local authorities. Government ministers also traveled to the area to try to convince people to stay, but Thoufeek said the residents were too afraid after Tamil rebels distributed a leaflet saying they could launch hostilities on Mutur "at any moment."
The contents of the leaflet could not immediately be verified, but Thoufeek said it apologized and told people to immediately leave for their own safety.
The federal government in Colombo was not immediately available to comment.
In violence elsewhere, a Tamil Tiger rebel was killed in a gunbattle on Jaffna peninsula in the volatile north, the military said in a statement Saturday. It also accused separatists of murdering a civilian woman Friday in the eastern town of Batticaloa.
The rebels were not immediately available to comment on the incidents.
Norwegian Ambassador Hans Brattskar on Friday met the Tamil Tigers' political leader, Suppiah Thamilselvan, in the northern rebel stronghold Kilinochchi. The two discussed a recent rash of abductions, the rebels said on their official Web site. No additional details were available.
Hundreds of civilians have been killed or have disappeared in shadowy circumstances since December, when the latest surge of fighting began in earnest.
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