COLOMBO, Sept 19, 2006 (AFP) - Sri Lankan air force jets pounded suspected Tamil Tiger targets in the island's east Tuesday, officials said, a day after troops and the guerrillas blamed each other for the massacre of 10 Muslim men.

Israeli-made Kfir war planes bombed positions of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the district of Batticaloa, the government's defence spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella said.

"We have taken identified LTTE targets in Batticaloa today," Rambukwella said without elaborating.

He also said authorities were sending investigators to the adjoining district of Ampara where 10 Muslim men were found hacked to death Monday.

The Tigers and local residents accused security forces of involvement while the government blamed the Tigers for the massacre.

"We want to get to the bottom of this," Rambukwella said. "The circumstantial evidence suggests it is the LTTE, but if anyone of us is involved, we will mete out maximum punishment."

Residents told reporters flown by the military to the massacre site Monday that police commandos were at loggerheads with locals and accused them of carrying out the killings.

Police chief Chandra Fernando said there would be a full investigation.

Inspector-General Fernando, who was visiting the area some 325 kilometers (203 miles) east of Colombo, said the friction with the locals was over police cracking down on illegal logging in neighbouring forests.

Journalists saw the victims had been hacked and their throats slit.

The LTTE has previously been accused of killing members of the Muslim community in the volatile, multi-ethnic east of the island, while government forces were accused by Nordic truce monitors of killing 17 employees of a French charity in August.

Both sides have denied the charges.

The deaths of the Muslims came a day after Sri Lankan armed forces sank a suspected Tiger gun-running ship off the coast of the Ampara district.

The new wave of violence has come even as peace broker Norway moved to arrange face-to-face talks between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers early next month in Oslo.

Both sides agreed last week to work to salvage a wilting truce in place since February 2002. More than 1,500 people have died in an upsurge of tit-for-tat violence in the past 10 months.

Tamil rebels have waged a drawn-out insurgency for a separate ethnic homeland in Sri Lanka, a majority Sinhalese nation. More than 60,000 people have died since the rebellion began in 1972.

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