Colombo: Some 100 kilos of TNT have been discovered in a lorry parked at a police station here, 17 years after the vehicle was seized during the Sri Lankan civil war involving the LTTE.
The lorry containing the explosive Trinitrotoluene (TNT) was impounded in 1996 on suspicion of carrying explosives from the north to be used for the frequent attacks carried out by LTTE militants at the time in the capital Colombo.
The parked lorry which was in a disintegrated state at the Kotahena police station in north Colombo was to be removed from the station premises yesterday when the high explosives were detected.
The use of a backhoe to remove the lorry wreck had led to the packages of concealed explosives falling off, the police said.
It was said that a police search for explosives in the lorry had drawn a blank in 1996.
The LTTE carried out a series of attacks in the city having transported high explosive C4 concealed in lorries.
The most prominent of the attacks was the 1996 bombing of the Central Bank building which killed 91 people and injured over 1,400.
The Sri Lankan Army vanquished the LTTE in 2009 after a brutal three-decade-long ethnic conflict that left thousands dead.
PTI
