Sri Lanka's Tamil-dominated northern region will hold its first elections for a provincial council that will grant limited autonomy to the former war zone, the president's office announced Monday. President Mahinda Rajapakse told newspaper editors that conditions were right to hold the northern provincial council elections in September more than four years after fighting there ended, his spokesman Mohan Samaranayake said.

The Sri Lankan government said Saturday that the attack on a Tamil newspaper office in northern Sri Lanka was orchestrated and carried out to tarnish the image of the government.The Uthayan office in Jaffna was attacked and the printing office set on fire by an unidentified group on Saturday morning causing extensive damage, the newspaper's editor said.The staff was preparing to distribute the newspapers when an armed gang entered the premises.

Sri Lanka's main Tamil party accused the government on Sunday of attacking the biggest opposition newspaper in an attempt to silence its political rivals ahead of key local council elections. The Tamil National Alliance (TNA), which represents minority ethnic Tamils, said Saturday's torching of the Uthayan newspaper presses added to a "fear psychosis" among the population in the northern district of Jaffna. "One of the main objectives (of the attack) is silencing the opposition ahead of provincial council elections," TNA legislator Suresh Premachandran told AFP.

Gunmen opened fire and torched the office of the main Tamil newspaper in northern Sri Lanka on Saturday, police said, the latest in a string of attacks on the nation's privately owned media. Three men staged the pre-dawn arson attack on the Uthayan newspaper's office and printing press in Jaffna, the main city in Sri Lanka's former civil war zone in the north of the country, owner Eswarapatham Saravanapavan told AFP.