A car bomb blast in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo killed two people on Tuesday, police said.

The victims, a woman and a child, were killed as the suspected Tamil Tiger bomb attack directed at the vehicle of a rival group senior member took place at the south Colombo's Milagiriya junction at 2.50 p.m. local time (0940 GMT), police said.

Seven others were injured and admitted to the Colombo National Hospital. The attack was suspected to be targeted at S Sivadasan, a fellow Tamil and a senior adviser to the Eelam People's Democratic Party (EPDP), which is bitterly opposed to the Tiger rebels.

The EPDP leader Douglas Devananda, who himself has survived several Tamil Tiger assassination attempts, is a minister in the government of President Mahinda Rajapakse.

The EPDP sources said Sivadasan was injured and is among the injured admitted to the hospital. "It looks as if the bomb was fixed to the van," a policeman who visited the explosion site immediately after the blast said on condition of anonymity.

The explosion in the capital came after Monday's claymore mine attack on a senior police officer in Kandy, the second largest city in the country. Violence since end of 2005 has seriously endangered the Norwegian effort to bring peace back through the process of direct negotiations.

More than 64,000 people have been killed in the island's separatist armed conflict since the Tamil Tiger rebels launched its armed campaign to carve out a separate homeland for the minority Tamil community in the north and eastern provinces.

Source: Xinhua