Word: zone
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...doctor working in a makeshift hospital inside the shrinking war zone in northern Sri Lanka told the Associated Press that 378 civilians had been killed and 1,100 injured due to heavy fire within the area demarcated as a no-fire zone by the government. The death toll kept rising as the day wore on. "Seeing the number of wounded and from what the people tell me, I estimate the death toll to be around 1,000," said Dr V Shanmugaraja. Early in the morning on May 12, the same hospital, located in the village of Mullivaikal, was hit again...
...under pressure from the Tigers, Samarasinghe says. "There may have been a gun pointed at the doctor's head to say what he had to say." The government also says it has no record of a doctor named Shanmugaraja registered with the Ministry of Health working inside the combat zone since October 2008. "It could have been anybody, it could have been [Tiger leader Velupillai] Prabhakaran's son," said Samarasinghe...
...spokesperson Gordon Weiss said on May 10 that doctors serving inside the shrinking combat zones have proved reliable in the past - a statement that drew sharp condemnation from Colombo. "Mr. Gordon Weiss should be a lot more discreet about what he says in public, given the sensitivities involved, especially at a time when emotions are running high, not only in Sri Lanka, but elsewhere as well," Foreign Secretary Palitha Kohona said. Weiss has overstepped his mandate, Kohona says, effectively giving a stamp of authenticity to unverified claims about the war. The Sri Lankan government has made it all but impossible...
...separate ethnic Tamil homeland since 1983. The Sri Lankan government says there are no more than 15,000 to 20,000. The LTTE holds only this small strip of territory on Sri Lanka's northeastern coast within an area designated by the Army as a so-called safe zone. Over the weekend, the Army announced that it had re-demarcated the safe zone, chopping it down to just 2.5 km long. The Army did not specify how it informed civilians that their safe area had been shrunk; in the past, it would use loudspeakers positioned on the front line...
...LTTE, meanwhile, continues to use the remaining civilians as human shields, according to the Army and human rights groups. Military sources say that the Tigers have moved the civilians away from the perimeter of the war zone, where they could escape as soon as the Army advanced, into the area's middle where the Mullivaikal hospital is located. On April 20, an estimated 100,000 civilians fled the zone within 72 hours when the Army breached a major Tiger fortification. Sri Lankan troops advanced a further 300 meters into Tiger territory on Tuesday. "We still believe that thousands of people...