While Mahaushada wishes to keep an open mind until the full evidence materialises, he thinks we cannot discount the peculiar observations of an Australian eyewitness.

The LTTE's strong disclaimer of this month's Colombo bombing, which totally devastated the capital's heavily protected commercial centre, was disregarded by many who held that the LTTE is the only force in Sri Lanka capable of carrying out an explosion of that magnitude and in that fashion (i.e., to bring in a truck loaded with a 500kg bomb into a heavily guarded part of Colombo banned to heavy vehicles, and to blow it up damaging the World Trade Centre and three five star hotels while confronting armed soldiers with unmatchable ferocity).

That argument needs qualification.

There is another force equally capable of an attack of that scale: the military itself.

But for many, any interpretation along such lines (a military conspiracy) is not easy to believe. Why, after all, would a section of the military want to do something that is guaranteed to jeopardise Sri Lanka's image abroad, undermine foreign investments and reflect badly on the military's capability to provide security in the country's south? That of course is a fairly persuasive argument, but some new revelations by an Australian tourist, who claims to have witnessed some key pre-bomb events from her Hilton hotel room, have thrown justifiable suspicion in the military's direction.

"It seemed a set up," the Melbourne woman has claimed. "What I saw was quite strange. I believe it was an army operation."

"Susan", the name by which she wishes to be known for the time being, belongs to three gun-clubs in Australia, and she presumably speaks with some experience when she describes what she saw that day.

The location of her hotel room, overlooking the car park where the bomb eventually went off, presented a unique opportunity for her to observe the events leading up to the explosion, which injured her and killed at least 13 people.

She woke, she said, to the sound of automatic gunfire outside the hotel at 06:50. When she looked out of the window she could see two soldiers casually strolling along an open walkway at the trade centre, their guns pointed upwards, even though they could clearly hear heavy firing taking place less than a hundred metres away. Susan says the soldiers made no effort to take cover. They just wandered around.

She also saw two soldiers with a rocket launcher. "They fired the rocket launcher straight down the road and into the ocean," she explained, "[but] there was absolutely nothing there. They then threw the launcher away and wandered slowly to the tennis club, absolutely unconcerned with being shot."

The impression Susan got was that the shoot-out that took place prior to the big explosion was somewhat fake.

She had seen soldiers just firing into the sea and moving casually through heavy gunfire. She also saw some armed men walking towards a stationary van and slowly drive off amid bursts of heavy firing.

An English tourist, Bernard Etkind, who was also hurt in the explosion, said he saw these alleged "Tigers" running beside a vehicle firing into the air!

All this happened prior to the explosion, and it was primarily this strange pattern of behaviour of soldiers and so-called "Tigers" that convinced Susan the whole episode was conceivably a set up.

The fact that it was a 'Poya' holiday would only strengthen Susan's allegations (if she is found to be a credible witness), since the quiet atmosphere on a holiday, particularly at that time of the morning, would be ideal for an operation of this kind.

It is not impossible, in the light of Susan's alleged observations, that the pre-bomb shoot-outs were a staged performance to confuse any remaining bystanders and clear the area prior to the main act.

Mahaushada, for his part, wishes not to claim any inside knowledge about the matter. He only wishes to look at alternative angles soberly and thoroughly.

Firstly, how could a truck carrying a 500kg bomb and several fully armed 'Tigers' pass so many military checkpoints, particularly on a quiet holiday at that time of the morning, when Sinhalese troops manning the checkpoints have less pressure to rush their check-ups?

Secondly, heavy vehicles are out of bounds to this high-security area and, therefore, stopping and checking the mentioned truck would have been (one would have thought) inevitable.

Thirdly, why would the LTTE want to immediately disclaim a highly successful penetration of Colombo's security network around the most sensitive commercial centre in Colombo, and deny an attack that can easily be justified as a legitimate economic target? (After all, the Sinhalese military has carried out hundreds of bombings on Tamil cities and villages during the past two years, which deserve the 'terrorist label' greatly more than this attack.)

Fourthly, in the context of the government's ongoing military operations in the north, it would not have been too harmful to the LTTE's image to demonstrate to the Sinhalese state that they are capable of attacking any Southern economic target at will, and that there cannot be a solution to the conflict without the LTTE's involvement. Yet, the LTTE's denial was bold and unequivocal.

For the sake of argument let us presume the Australian woman's claims are plausible and let us also give the benefit of the doubt to the Tigers' disclaimer.

We would still need to find convincing answers to the following two questions:

1. Is the Sri Lankan military capable of carrying out such a sordid act?
2. Is there a motive strong enough to explain the military resorting to such a despicable act, disregarding the damage it would do to the Sri Lankan economy and the military's reputation?

The answer to the first question, regarding military capability, is a categorical Yes.

It is now proven that during the late 1980's an elite network of politically conscious layers consisting of highly placed military leaders and politicians emerged in Sri Lanka to carry out abominable operations "in the interests of the state".

In fact, this network acted as a state-within-the-state and in 1989 carried out a ruthless campaign of terror against the country's Sinhalese youth in the South, killing and 'disappearing' over 60,000 young people in the name of defending the state.

At one stage, the then minister of defence even organised hundreds of specially selected soldiers to infiltrate the radical JVP movement and carry out ruthless killings of innocent people, including prominent politicians and a few popular broadcasters, in order to discredit the JVP and prepare the ground for large-scale random killings of Sinhalese youth. In brief, sections within the Sinhalese political establishment and the military have a proven record of going to extreme and brutal lengths to achieve political ends.

The PA government's election pledge to bring such sections to justice has not materialised; they still occupy powerful establishment positions.

The recent revelation of a presidential commission that two political assassinations blamed on the LTTE were in fact the work of the then president Ranasinghe Premadasa, is a case in point.

On the second question, that of a military motive, an LTTE spokesman in London said that the government could have set up the attack to rob the Tigers of international support.

It is tempting to believe this interpretation, particularly in the context of the huge pro-LTTE propaganda offensive planned for the commonwealth heads of states conference in Edinburgh. With the US government having only just branded the LTTE a "terrorist" group, the government was known to be desperate to get Britain to do the same.

It is no secret that there is extreme concern among government circles about the growing UK Tamil lobby.

It is not too impossible, then, to imagine that some sections within the government would plot to achieve this end by carrying out a well-timed atrocity of this kind.

If so, they would have banked on international opinion being quick to disregard any LTTE denial, the way the international community usually does?

However, considering the enormity of the damage done to Sri Lanka's economy and to the government's reputation, one is entitled to speculate about other motives. Let us not ignore the possibility of a politically conscious layer overarching the political, military and business establishment getting nervous about the political and economic catastrophe facing the country due to the unwinnable and costly war.

Such a panicky layer would have to act quickly, sensing that Sri Lanka's parliamentary system has turned into an albatross that effectively undermines a realistic solution to the country's conflict.

The executive president, Ms. Chandrika Kumaratunga, recently expressed in public her disgust at the country's parliament, and the desirability of a dictatorship for the prosperity of the country, comments which evidently reflect a trend of thinking taking place on the highest levels of the government.

We must also realise that it is the military which for all practical purposes holds the greatest power in the country (and consumes the biggest chunk of the nation's present income).

It is their troops that are getting killed in their thousands.

So it is almost inevitable that sections within the military might be beginning to despise the opportunistic politics of many Sinhalese politicians. (Of course, the other possibility is also there: sections within the establishment benefiting from the war may want to stem any momentum towards a political settlement at all, and may see a dictatorship as a way of ensuring continued conflict).

If either of these sections are contemplating a military take-over, the natural starting point would be to generate fear and insecurity in the minds of the general public, on a massive scale. A bomb of this kind would help to unsettle people. It creates a psychological environment more conducive to a military take-over, whether that take-over is meant to usher in a realistic settlement of the war or to ensure its longevity.

Even the unprecedented security sweep which security forces carried out in Colombo a few days after the explosion looked more like an effort to familiarise the public with a large-scale military presence rather than an effort "to catch the bombers".

Perhaps it is not accidental that the president in her initial reaction to the bomb referred to it as the work of a terrorist group without blaming the Tigers specifically.

Mahaushada's speculations based on these real possibilities may not answer all the facts relating to the Colombo bombing, and subsequent evidence may indeed prove it to be the work of the LTTE, but they will hopefully alert true investigative journalists in Colombo to probe the events a little more thoroughly than they have chosen to do so far.