Kumaratunga gambles on alliance with husband's suspected killers

Sinhalese nationalist JVP tarnished by decades of violence

Vijaya Kumaratunga was a charismatic left-wing politician and former matinee idol who made dangerous enemies while talking the language of peace.

Young, handsome and used to playing the hero, Kumaratunga had formed his own party and set about trying to find a solution to the ethnic turmoil that had plagued Sri Lanka since independence.

In a radical departure, he was talking - and more remarkably listening - to the minority Tamils, who for so long had been on the receiving end of Sinhalese chauvinism, and who had taken up arms in a fight for self-rule.

But, by February 1988, his foes had decided enough was enough. Two men rode up to the front gates of his house in suburban Colombo on a red motorcycle and shot Kumaratunga as he stood beside his wife. He died in her arms.

Sixteen years later, the organisation widely believed to have ordered the killing, the Sinhalese nationalist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), is preparing to fight a parliamentary election on April 2 in an alliance with Kumaratunga's widow, President Chandrika Kumaratunga.

The third poll in four years has been triggered by a dispute, between the president and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, over the latest attempt to broker peace with the Tamils.