Nearly 200 people were feared to have been buried alive in Sri Lanka after a devastating landslide triggered by rains destroyed the homes of mostly Indian-origin plantation workers, as heavy machinery was deployed on Thursday in rescue operations involving the army.
The SHO said that Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act had been included in the FIR, adding that the Chinese national would be presented before a court in Abbottabad.
Sherine Xavier, a Sri Lankan Tamil filmmaker from Canada, is happy. After months of struggle with the Indian censor board, she has finally obtained approval to screen her film Muttrupullia?, which deals with the post-war situation in Sri Lanka's Tamil areas.
The prime minister should have visited Sri Lanka, armed with a critique of the Rajapakse government based on nuance and fact, says Sreenivasan Jain
'That it was the LTTE was known in three weeks's time.'
Whether it is Sri Lanka, Maldives, or Nepal, quietly but steadily, India has been reclaiming some of the ground it had lost to China, observes Aditi Phadnis.
Rescuers pulled out more bodies from the muddy debris of disastrous landslide taking the toll to over 80.
A Pakistani anti-terrorism court has sent a Chinese national to jail on 14-day judicial remand on blasphemy charges in the restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province after he was arrested on Monday, according to media reports on Tuesday.
Sri Lankan Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa on Thursday met Defence Minister A K Antony in New Delhi. Rajapaksa and his Indian counterpart Shashikant Sharma had discussed increasing the frequency of joint exercises, training of Lankan officers in Indian institutes, supply of non-lethal defence equipment and other issues.
The 2016 SAARC Summit was originally planned to be held in Islamabad on November 15-19, 2016. But after a terror attack on an Indian Army camp in Uri in Jammu and Kashmir on September 18 that year, India expressed its inability to participate in the summit due to "prevailing circumstances". The summit was called off after Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan also declined to participate in the Islamabad meet.
Though dubbed as the "war hero", the role of Rajapaksa in ending the conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam with the death of its supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran in 2009 is quite divisive as he stands accused of violating human rights, a charge he vehemently denies.
'We believe that one of the suicide bombers studied in the UK and maybe later on did his post-graduate in Australia, before coming back to settle in Sri Lanka'
-- Seven suicide bombers believed to be members of an Islamist extremist group carried out the series of explosions. -- Police have so far arrested 24 people - mostly members of an Islamist extremist group - in connection with the blasts
'As I went around Batticaloa, Trincomalee, Jaffna and Mannar, my mind went back to my visit in January 1990 at the fag end of the IPKFs mission in Sri Lanka,' says Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
In the endlessly entertaining and absorbing soap opera that is India-Sri Lanka relations, wait for the next episode, Aditi Phadnis reports.
Mahinda Rajapaksa, along with his wife and family, fled his official residence -- Temple Trees -- and took shelter at the naval base in Trincomalee.
Over 15 million voters are eligible to vote in the election being held under electoral districts-based proportional representation system.
Seven persons had been arrested in connection with the blasts.
The Yuan Wang 5 can easily monitor the Indian coast while operating in international waters. She does not have to enter a port in Sri Lanka to fulfill this mission, points out Commodore Venugopal Menon (retd).
Rajapaksa is the first president to be sworn in outside Colombo.
After nearly two days of political deadlock, the stakeholders are engaged in prolonged talks to try and appoint a successor to Mahinda Rajapaksa.
Any form of entanglement with India or the US on the strategic plane will be anathema to Sri Lanka's Rajapaksa rulers, observes Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
Mahinda Rajapaksa has been accused by the Opposition of inciting the ruling party mobs to attack peaceful protesters by making a defiant speech while addressing several thousands of his supporters to deflect calls for his resignation.
In a conversation with R Ramasubramanian, Xavier said, "My documentary attempts to find answers to those frequently asked questions from Tamil refugees who are still in India."
Advancing Sri Lankan troops today made further inroads into tiger strongholds capturing the strategic town of Mankulam just adjacent to their prized goal of Kilinochchi as reports said a worried LTTE was sending its top commanders to the battlefront.
Over 100 personnel from Sri Lanka's elite Special Task Force on Friday raided the office of former army chief and defeated opposition presidential candidate General Sarath Fonseka in Colombo."I don't know what they are looking for. They have also questioned the staff," said a close aide of Fonseka, who was trounced by incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa in the January 26 presidential polls.
The 225-member Parliament will elect the new president by a secret vote on July 20, Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena said on Friday.
Lankan Speaker told the party leaders that Parliament will meet on July 20 to elect a new president.
Rajapaksa, his wife Loma and their two security officers were expected to leave for Singapore on board SQ437 from Male on Wednesday night but did not board the aircraft due to security concerns, the Daily Mirror newspaper reported.
The Tigers accused the military of 'insensitivity' in carrying out the attack on the day of Balasingham's funeral.
The President had been moved out of his residence on Friday, in anticipation of Saturday's protests.
'With Punjab and Kashmir in flames, it would not have been politically wise to alienate the West.' 'It would have inclined Western countries towards Pakistan.' 'It would have been a self-goal.'
"One of the military outposts at Thalgasmankada, located about 50 km south of Pottuvil, guarding the Yala national park came under the LTTE attack on Monday night. Six soldiers were killed and one more wounded," military spokesman Udaya Nanayakkara told UNI over phone, adding that the military had repulsed the rebel attack.
Sri Lanka declared a state of emergency on Wednesday as angry protesters stormed the prime minister's office in Colombo, hours after president Gotabaya Rajapksa fled to the Maldives on a military jet, amid the country's worst economic crisis in decades.
Sri Lanka on Tuesday dismissed as "fabricated lies", a report by a leading rights group alleging that its military used rape and other forms of sexual violence to torture suspected Tamil rebels since the end of the island's civil war in 2009.
Dealing with the Sirisena government in Sri Lanka, says G Ganapathy Subramaniam, is a lot easier for India than engaging with the Rajapaksa regime.
There was a 'fascist threat' to democracy in Sri Lanka and 'we can't let them tear up our Constitution', acting President Ranil Wickremesinghe told the crisis-hit nation on Wednesday, as he vowed to restore normalcy as well as stop the destruction of state property.
The Bharatiya Janata Party's key ally in Tamil Nadu, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam on Wednesday slammed the saffron party alleging that it is anti-Tamil and claimed that the party could never grow in the state.
Security has been beefed up in Sri Lanka as the army increased its deployment by 1,300 to 6,300.
'The residual historical hostility against India was certainly a factor,' says Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
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