A Sri Lankan minister was killed by a roadside bomb planted by suspected Tamil Tiger rebels north of the capital today; the second MP killed in a week as a protracted civil war escalates. Nation Building Minister D.M. Dassanayake, whose vehicle was hit by the blast today in the morning in the town of Ja-Ela, 19 km north of Colombo on the road to the island's only international airport, died on the operating table. "He died a short while ago," said Lalini Gurusinghe, deputy director of the government teaching hospital in the nearby town of Ragama, where the minister and 10 others wounded in the blast were taken. Local television broadcasted footage of the ministers' Toyota Land Cruiser showing pictures of its windows shattered, sides peppered with shrapnel sprayed by the Claymore fragmentation mine and blood smeared on a rear passenger door and in a pool on the ground. A doctor was pictured sitting astride the minister on a trolley, pumping his chest as he was rushed to the operating theatre. SOURCE: SABC