Navaly Church Bombing

Date: July 9, 1995 • Location: Jaffna, Sri Lanka

Sri Lankan civil war: After advising civilians to take shelter in places of worship, the Sri Lanka Air Force bombed a church in Navaly, killing at least 147 people.

The Sri Lankan civil war was an armed conflict fought in Sri Lanka from 1983 to 2009. Beginning on 23 July 1983, it was an intermittent insurgency against the government by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam led by Velupillai Prabhakaran. The LTTE fought to create an independent Tamil state called Tamil Eelam in the north-east of the island in response to continuous discrimination and violent persecution against Sri Lankan Tamils by the predominantly Sinhalese government of Sri Lanka.