A suicide bomb attack has killed a senior army general and three other soldiers near Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo.
A car carrying Major General Parami Kulatunga, the third highest ranking officer in Sri Lanka's military, was hit by the suicide bomber on a motorcycle.
The general was heading to work in Colombo and the attack took place close to his home in Pannipitiya, nine miles southeast of Colombo's centre. Maj Gen Kulatunga survived the initial blast but died on the way to the city's National Hospital.
The blast also killed the general's driver, a security guard and a civilian passer-by, the military said.
An hour after the explosion, the general's Peugeot was still on fire. Another vehicle in the general's convoy, a pickup-truck, was also damaged.
Five people were wounded in the bombing. Authorities quickly blamed the Tamil Tiger rebels for the blast.
Four months of violence has brought Sri Lanka close to the brink of resuming full-scale civil war. Today's attack came just over two months after the Tigers tried to kill Sri Lanka's top military commander in a suicide bombing in Colombo.
Discrimination against Sri Lanka's 3.2 million Tamils, most of whom are Hindu, led the Tigers to take up arms in 1983. The resulting war on this tropical island of 19 million people - nearly three-quarters of them Buddhist Sinhalese - left more than 65,000 people dead before a 2002 ceasefire.