The armoured Mercedes Benz limousine parked between the woman bomber and her intended victim, saved the president´s life, although she was hit by shrapnel in the region of the eye. Whether she will lose one eye as a result of the bomb was not clear as this was being written, but the president and her government have made it plain that she will continue to lead the country in a relentless drive to rid Sri Lanka of the scourge of Tiger ´terrorism´.
As Kumaratunga noted in a remarkably well-crafted acceptance speech after winning the presidential election, "I hold the unique distinction of being the one political leader against whom an LTTE assassination attempt had failed." She followed up that statement by confidently declaring: "I will be the one political leader against whom the entire LTTE terror enterprise will fail."
The vast majority of Sri Lankans, whatever their political persuasion, will certainly hope and pray that she is right. But they know only too well that Prabhakaran, who had the United National Party´s presidential candidate, Gamini Dissanayake, assassinated during the 1994 campaign, thereby assuring Kumaratunga of the plum with a massive 62 percent of the vote, will revert to the old guerrilla dictum he´s fond of often citing: "We have to be lucky only once while you have to be lucky every time."
No doubt Kumaratunga, or for that matter opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe of the UNP, whom Prabhakaran backed for the presidency this time, will be ultra securityconscious in the future. But the fact remains that the massive apparatus employed to protect Kumaratunga was penetrated, and nearly fatally, this time.