By Lindsay Beck
COLOMBO, April 21 (Reuters) - Sinhalese civilians attacked a Tamil village in Sri Lanka's northeast on Friday after a mine attack blamed on the Tamil Tigers killed a policeman.
The violence near the northeastern city of Trincomalee came a day after the Tigers said they were postponing indefinitely talks with the government initially set for next week, despite the efforts of a Norwegian peace envoy.
"It was a claymore explosion early this morning," said army spokesman Prasad Samarasinghe, referring to the type of fragmentation mine.
The blast killed one police officer and wounded a second as the two were conducting a foot patrol. A group of ethnic Sinhalese residents then attacked a Tamil village in anger over the blast, he said.
The government and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) signed a ceasefire in 2002 after two decades of civil war, but about 80 people have been killed in the past two weeks and many fear the island could be heading back to a full-scale conflict.
One person was killed and three houses burned before the violence near Trincomalee was brought under control, Rohan Abeywardene, the top police official in the east, told Reuters.
The army could not confirm the report but said military and police had quelled the riot and the situation was now calm.
PEACE MISSION
Swedish Major-General Ulf Henricsson, head of the unarmed Nordic monitoring mission that oversees the truce, flew to the rebels' northern headquarters earlier on Friday for a meeting with Tiger political wing leader S.P. Thamilselvan.
"It is just an attempt to see if they can break the deadlock," said Helen Olafsdottir, spokeswoman for the mission.
Norwegian peace envoy Jon Hanssen-Bauer met Thamilselvan on Thursday to try to salvage the talks, which were to take place in Geneva next week.
But Thamilselvan said the rebels, who have been fighting for a separate state for minority Tamils in the north and east, would not return to the negotiating table while violence continued, and accused the government of pushing the country towards war.
The LTTE denies involvement in the spate of mine attacks and is demanding an end to what they say is the army's complicity with a group of rebels based in the east and led by a former Tiger commander known as Karuna Amman.
Hanssen-Bauer remained in Colombo on Friday, where he had a second meeting with the foreign minister, and his departure remained open-ended.
Analysts and residents fear a slide back to the war that killed more than 64,000.
In the northern Jaffna peninsula, a Tamil-majority area that suffered some of the heaviest fighting, security had increased and the atmosphere was tense.
"During the last two to three weeks, the number of army personnel in the 10-mile distance (16 km) I travel to work has trebled," said 32-year-old Satheeswaran Ramanathan, a government office worker.
"Every 10 metres there are at least two soldiers and there are more and barricades new sentry points," he said.
There are also worries the Tigers could raise the stakes with an attack on the capital Colombo, which would shatter confidence in the island's $20 billion economy, already hard hit by the 2004 tsunami.