Colombo: Sri Lanka's air force bombed LTTE targets near the rebels' northern stronghold and in the island's northwest on Thursday, the military said, the second consecutive day of air raids in the wake of failed peace talks.
The Tigers said the air force dropped four shells near a hospital around three km from the rebels' political offices in their northern stronghold of Kilinochchi, destroying a house and killing its five civilian occupants.
Nordic truce monitors confirmed the site of the bombing, which was just 2.5 km from their own offices and close to the hospital. It was the closest that air force bombs have fallen to the rebel nerve centre since a 2002 ceasefire.
"The house was smashed. A mother, a father, two children and a grandmother were all killed," LTTE spokesman Rasiah Ilanthiraiyan said by telephone from Kilinochchi.
"Fragments flew as far as a hospital 500 metres away and smashed windows. Patients fled - one woman was in labour and you could see her trail of blood as far as the road," he added. "This is state terrorism."
The military said it had targeted two Tiger military targets it viewed as threats to national security.
"We have taken two targets. One is a Sea Tiger base in Mannar (in the northwest), and the other is a military training camp 10 km southeast of Kilinochchi," said military spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe.
The air raids came as the two sides continued artillery duels in the north and east for a fourth day. On Wednesday jets pounded the restive eastern district of Batticaloa.
Analysts and diplomats fear a new chapter in the island's two-decade civil war could escalate into an all-out return to a conflict that has killed more than 65,000 people since 1983.
Crunch peace talks, the first in eight months, broke down on Sunday, the two sides unable even to agree on whether to meet again. The talks in Geneva collapsed over the government's closure in August of the main north-south A-9 highway, which runs through rebel territory and to the isolated, northern army-held Jaffna peninsula.
The government argues that rebel artillery fire makes the road unsafe and that the Tigers have been moving troops and munitions on it and raising war funds by demanding a "tax" from vehicles passing along it.
It said it would only reopen the highway if the Tigers halt violence.
"The situation is discouraging and the talks in Geneva did not have any positive impact on the ground situation," said spokeswoman for the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission, Helen Olafsdottir.
The Monitoring Mission oversees what is left of the battered truce.
"The air strikes are of course a violation of the Ceasefire Agreement. Unfortunately both sides are violating the agreement to the extent that few people are calling it a ceasefire. We can only hope that both sides wake up before it's too late."
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