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Sri Lanka's Tamil-majority north votes in provincial polls

India TV News Desk [Published on:21 Sep 2013, 6:18 PM]
India TV News
Colombo: Sri Lanka's Tamil-majority Northern Province and two other regions today voted to elect three provincial councils, four years after the Tamil Tiger rebels were vanquished.




Over four million people were eligible to vote in the Northern, North Western and Central provinces, the government's news portal news.lk reported.

Serpentine queues were seen in front of polling centres as hundreds of ethnic Tamils, young and old, cast their votes in Jaffna. In Matale, Mannar, Kandy, the queues spilled over to the roads. Elderly and disabled voters were carried by their relatives to polling stations.

”We want a settlement for the Tamils. That's why we came to vote this time. We've been waiting so many years - now we want peace,” an elderly woman voter told BBC.

The Northern Province is the only region which has never had its own council, BBC said.

Election Commissioner Mahinda Deshappriya said voting went on peacefully.

Police and election observers said there were no major incidents of polling violation from any of the provinces.

The People's Action for Free and Fair Elections group, which has over 1,000 monitors in the north, told Xinhua the house of a polling agent was set on fire but no one was hurt.

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