A low-flying Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)-owned aircraft—a Czech-manufactured Zlin–143, single-engine trainer with a maximum flying speed of 267 kph, a wing-span of 6.95m and a length of 8.8m, and requiring a runway of at least 500m for normal takeoff and landing—proceeded south from a jungle hideout in the northern plains of Sri Lanka, droppedthree bombs on Sri Lanka's principal Air Force base at Katunayake at approximately 0100 hrs on Monday, March 26, 2006, and returned unharmed to its base an hour later. Two of the bombs exploded, killing three airmen and injuring about 15 others in the engineering section of the Airbase. According to post-attack official reports, the Israel-built Kfirs and the Ukranian Mig-27s (constituting the main fighter squadrons of the Air Force, used intensively and effectively for pounding LTTE military bases and encampments in the northern and eastern parts of the country throughout the past few months) on which the bombing raid is believed to have been targeted, escaped damage.
Needless to stress, any violent confrontation that results in death and injury cannot be trivialised. Yet, in the context of the ferocity that has characterized the undeclared war between thegovernment and the LTTE over the past few months, and as an event that represents the culmination of an almost decade-long effort by the Tigers to acquire capacity for aerial attack, last Monday's bombing of the airbase was a costly fiasco—costly, because it would attract not only retaliatory offensive action but also greater international concern, especially on the possible emulative effects of the modality of attack, and enhanced vigilance both in Sri Lanka and abroad on procurement of military hardware by the Tigers from clandestine arms markets. And, the attack was a fiasco in the sense that it failed to achieve its objective of reducing thegovernment's air-strike capability. Indeed, beginning at dawn on Monday, the Sri Lanka Air Force staged a series of furious attacks on LTTE targets almost as if to broadcast the fact that its fighter squadrons remained intact.
Nevertheless, from propaganda perspectives, the LTTE attack did achieve a fairly high level of success. It evoked extraordinary worldwide media attention. In the hourly BBC news broadcasts, for instance, distorted versions of the attack (including an early claim that the Tigers had bombed the international airport at Katunayake) remained the first item of'World News' repeated over more than twelve hours, upstaging Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and other major trouble-spots of the world—a unique'record' for the island despite its two decades of major convulsions.
The less subtle purveyors of anti-Sri Lankan propaganda employed innumerable websites to sensationalise the event as a major Tiger triumph, claiming that the attack would have a cataclysmic impact not only thegovernment's war effort, but also on the country's economy and, indeed, the survival prospects of thegovernment. Identifying the attack as the first of its kind by any terrorist organization employing its own resources for an air attack, several media pundits perceived in it the onset of a horrendous new phase of the Sri Lankan conflict.