A senior government security official was killed in a claymore mine explosion in the early hours of Monday in central Sri Lanka as fighting continued in the eastern province, defense officials said.

Senior Superintendent of Police, Upul Seneviratne, the Training and the Operations Director of the police's elite Special Task Force (STF) was blown up near his home at Digana in the Central Kandy district at around 4:45 AM local time (23:45 GMT) as he was being driven away to capital Colombo.

A claymore mine blamed on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels is the cause for the accident in which his driver was also seriously hurt, the National Security Media Center here said.

Seneviratne, a key member of the STF, was the most senior STF officer to have been killed since the February 2002 ceasefire.

The defense officials said that the military was keeping its advance to the sluice gate closed down by the Tigers after a Norwegian brokered deal failed to materialize on Sunday.

The LTTE with the Norwegian special envoy Jon Hanssen-Bauer agreed to open the sluice gate closed down since July 20 at 4 PM local time on Sunday only to be told by the government that they would not agree to the conditions attached by the rebels to the opening of the gate which provides water to some 15,000 families and 30,000 acres in the eastern province's Trincomalee district.

Meanwhile a French aid agency said Monday that it was to lodge complain with the government over a gunning down of 15 of its local employees on Sunday at its office in the troubled town of Muttur.

Who had done the killing is yet to be established.

The LTTE has blamed the security forces for the killing which had taken place after people, mostly Muslims, fled Muttur on Friday.

The LTTE last Wednesday launched a mortar and artillery attack on the Muslim dominated town and appeared to be in control of at least some parts of the town until the government's elite troops managed to wrest back total control.

(Xinhua News Agency August 7, 2006)