Three Sri Lankan soldiers shot dead: army

COLOMBO: Three Sri Lankan soldiers have been shot dead in the Tamil-majority peninsula of Jaffna, the army said on Friday, and one source said it may have been a case of murder-suicide.

The soldiers were the first to be killed on the far northern peninsula since the end of the Indian Ocean island's civil war in 2009.

The victims were on duty near a Hindu temple in the town of Chavakachcheri in Jaffna on Thursday night, military spokesman Nihal Hapuarachchi told AFP.

A police source in Jaffna, who asked not to be identified, told AFP that preliminary enquiries suggested two soldiers had been killed by a colleague who then turned the gun on himself.

Jaffna was long a stronghold of the Tamil Tigers, the separatist force which was wiped out by the Sri Lankan army in a huge military campaign in 2009. The campaign remains dogged by allegations of war crimes.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2012