UNP leader and presidential candidate Ranil Wickremesinghe said Kumaratunga's approach to the LTTE was against the spirit of the agreement brokered between the government and Opposition by British Tory MP Liam Fox for a bipartisan approach to negotiations. Wickremsinghe, who has been at the receiving end of a shrill campaign by Kumaratunga accusing him of being in a conspiracy with the LTTE to "pave the way for Eelam", said in a letter to the President on Monday that in the light of recent revelations, it was "breathtaking hypocrisy" for her to have attacked him.

Last week, Velupillai Prabhakaran said in a speech on the LTTE's "Heroes' Day" that Kumaratunga had approached him through a third party mediator for"secret talks" but he had rejected it as it did not meet his conditions.

On the same day, in London, LTTE political advisor Anton Balasingham revealed that Kumaratunga had approached the group for holding secret talks outside Sri Lanka three times.

In fact, this was only a corroboration of what Kumaratunga herself told a group of the capital's Tamil residents recently, that she had been trying to revive dialogue with the LTTE through a third party since 1997. But, she said, there had been no response from Prabhakaran.

It is obvious that in the race for the Sinhala vote which is now evenly poised between Kumaratunga and Wickremesinghe, each candidate is trying to project the other as cosying up to Sri Lanka's public enemy number 1, the Tamil Tigers.