Black Tigers' record of terror

COLOMBO: The Black Tigers - a special LTTE unit - have long been regarded as the world's most proficient suicide squad, having perfected the use of suicide bombing in Sri Lanka even before al-Qaida was formed.

On Tuesday, the Black Tigers struck again, the military said.

A female suicide bomber - pretending to be pregnant to conceal her explosives - targeted the car of Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka, Sri Lanka's army commander, inside Colombo's heavily fortified military headquarters.

The brazen attack killed eight people and wounded 27, including Fonseka, who suffered serious abdominal injuries.

The Black Tigers are renowned for their skill at deploying human bombs against military, economic and civilian targets.

Black Tiger victims have included former Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa, former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, and numerous Sri Lankan ministers and senior politicians.

Another former president, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, narrowly survived a suicide attack in 1999, but lost one eye in the blast.

According to University of Chicago Professor Robert Pape, author of "Dying to Win," there were 315 suicide bombings worldwide in 1980-2003. Of those, 76 were carried out by the Black Tigers. "The leading instigator of suicide attacks is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka," Pape wrote in a May 2005 op-ed piece in The New York Times.

The first Black Tigers suicide attack was on July 5, 1987, when a rebel known as Captain Miller drove a truckload of explosives into a military camp and detonated them, killing 40 soldiers. Since then, 240 other Tigers have blown themselves up.

The Black Tigers have also staged daring suicide truck bomb attacks on the country's Central Bank in the heart of the capital, Sri Lanka's World Trade Centre, and the Temple of the Tooth, a holy site for the country's majority Buddhists.

The Tigers have also piloted explosive-laden boats into Navy ships.

The last suicide blast came on July 7, 2004, when a woman believed to have been plotting to kill a Tamil Government Minister opposed to the LTTE blew herself up while being frisked at a police station. Four officers were killed.

Associated Press