Shelling killed a Red Cross worker inside Sri Lanka's war zone on Wednesday, the aid agency said, while troops and the Tamil Tigers battled in an intensifying fight to the finish of Asia's longest modern war, Reuters reported.
The pro-rebel web site www.TamilNet.com, and a government-employed doctor in the war zone whose personal security is at the whim of the Tigers, said at least 38 people were killed in an attack on a makeshift medical clinic.
The military called the report fabricated.
The seeming inevitability of a final, bloody confrontation has grown amid Western outrage over attacks that killed hundreds at the weekend and which aid agencies said was making it impossible to help those people still being held by the Tigers.
Analysts and diplomats said the end of voting in India's month-long election on Wednesday was likely to usher in an all-out attack by Sri Lanka to wipe out the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and bring a conventional end to a 25-year war.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), for days unable to ferry out wounded and deliver aid by boat because of fighting, said a 31-year-old local staff member and his mother were killed by a shell.
The ICRC is the only foreign aid agency inside the war zone.
Spokeswoman Sarasi Wijeratne did not say who fired the shell.
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