Sri Lankan starves to death in north, first on record

An odd-job man has starved to death in Sri Lanka's war-torn north, officials said on Thursday, the first such death since state records began in 1991.

But officials said the death of Muthiah Chandrapala, 50, was not linked with food shortages in the northern Jaffna peninsula due to renewed civil war.

Chandrapala died on Wednesday near the town of Point Pedro in the army-held Jaffna peninsula, where around 500,000 Tamils have been cut off from the rest of the island by Tamil Tiger rebel lines for months.

"This is the first time a person has died of starvation," said Nadarajah Thangarajah, acting judge at the district court of Point Pedro, who conducted the inquest and signed the death certificate.

"But please don't try to connect this death to the shortage of food in Jaffna," he added. "It is not relevant, because this person was almost like an orphan. He didn't have a permanent home, he was a daily wage earner doing odd jobs. He lived like a vagabond."

Sri Lankan state authorities have not kept records of starvation deaths prior to 1991. However a Tamil Tiger fighter starved himself to death in a protest in 1987.

Food is in short supply in the Jaffna region because the military has shut down the main north-south highway that runs through rebel territory, saying it was unsafe because of rebel artillery fire. Food is being shipped in by boat.

Residents receive rations, but say they are not enough.

Local government officials say that between August and September, Jaffna peninsula was short 11,055 tonnes of essentials like rice, flour and sugar.

The price of staples like fish and vegetables have soared and some goods, like matches and mosquito coils, have gone up 10-fold, in turn coinciding with a suspected outbreak of hundreds of cases of mosquito-borne Chikungaya fever.

-JAFFNA, Sri Lanka (Reuters)