More than 1,000 police and troops scoured Colombo yesterday for one or more snipers, suspected to be Tamil Tiger rebels, who gunned down Sri Lanka's foreign minister and rekindled fears of a return to civil war.

A dozen Tamils were detained in Colombo for questioning "taken on suspicion," military spokesman Brigadier Daya Ratnayake said but the assassins were not thought to be among them.

Soldiers checked cars entering or leaving Colombo after the government declared a state of emergency as a precautionary measure to allow mass troop movements following the assassination of Lakshman Kadirgamar.

But newspapers in Colombo, critical of the reaction by Kadirgamar's security detail in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, said the gunmen could be anywhere.

"The manner in which Kadirgamar was killed was a disgrace to any security operation," The Sunday Island said in a commentary.

The area around Kadirgamar's home was not sealed off quickly after he was shot four times from a house across the street as he emerged from his swimming pool on Friday night, giving the gunmen plenty of time to escape, it said.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which usually denied responsibility for attacks in Colombo before a ceasefire in the two-decades-old civil war was agreed in 2002, said it was not involved in the assassination.

President Chandrika Kumaratunga's government, which declared the ceasefire still intact, said the denial was hard to swallow.

"We must get the international community to pressure the LTTE to stop these killings," Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa told reporters as most of the 15 parties represented in parliament issued a statement blaming the Tigers for the murder.

Investigators found cartridge casings from a sniper rifle, a grenade launcher, the remains of food and chocolate wrappers in the house from which Kadirgamar was shot in Colombo's elegant diplomatic quarter.

They say the gunmen hid upstairs in the house and shot Kadirgamar twice in the head, once in the throat and once in the chest. A Tamil couple who own the property are under house arrest for questioning, but have not been charged. The 73-year-old Oxford-educated minister will be given a state funeral today. Shops and cinemas will close in respect.

Kadirgamar had long been at the top of the Tigers' hit list for campaigning to have them labelled a terrorist group by the United States and Britain. Because he was a Tamil, many hardliners called him a traitor.

There are no signs yet of a return to a war in which more than 64,000 people were killed and swathes of the north and east ravaged, but the killing has plunged the island's peace process into its worse crisis since the truce was agreed.

(China Daily August 15, 2005)