Police discover suspected former LTTE ammo dump

The police said that the ammunition discovered at a private land in Kilinochchi on Monday (13) night may have been an underground storage maintained by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The Special Task Force (STF) unit of police attached to Kilinochchi has currently unearthed 104,000 T-56 bullets from the area where the first pack of bullets were found three days earlier.

The STF said excavation in the area was still underway to find whether there was more ammunition stored deeper beneath the soil. 65 boxes of T-56 ammunition have been unearthed so far. A box of ammunition consisted of 750 bullets.  Apart from the 48,750 ammunition found in the boxes, another 55,250 bullets were found buried nearby.

The bullets have been first detected on Monday (13) when the private land owner had excavated the ground to erect a building.  The land owner had contacted the police regarding a box of ammunition he had discovered, upon which the police too had discovered 1500 T-56 ammunition.

A court order was later obtained from Kilinochchi courts to carry out more excavations.

The police also suspect that the area might have been an underground ammunition storage of the LTTE during the war. They also suspect that the ammunition might have been hidden in the area to be used at a later stage.

(Pix by Romesh Madusanka)