Sri Lankans pay their last respects to slain foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar at his official residence in Colombo on Sunday. (Reuters)

Colombo, Aug. 14 (Reuters): More than 1,000 police and troops scoured Colombo today for one or more snipers, suspected to be Tamil Tigers, who gunned down Sri Lanka’s foreign minister and rekindled fears of a return to civil war.

A dozen Tamils were detained in Colombo for questioning ? “taken on suspicion”, military spokesperson Brigadier Daya Ratnayake said ? but the assassins were not thought to be among them.

Soldiers checked cars entering or leaving Colombo after the government declared a state of emergency yesterday as a precautionary measure to allow mass troop movements following the assassination of Lakshman Kadirgamar.

But newspapers in Colombo, critical of the reaction by Kadirgamar’s security detail in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, said the gunmen could be anywhere.

“The manner in which Kadirgamar was killed was a disgrace to any security operation,” The Sunday Island said in a commentary.

The area around Kadirgamar’s home was not sealed off quickly after he was shot four times from a house across the street as he emerged from his swimming pool on Friday night, giving the gunmen plenty of time to escape, it said.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which usually denied responsibility for attacks in Colombo before a ceasefire in the two-decades-old civil war was agreed in 2002, said it was not involved in the assassination.

Few in Colombo appeared to believe the Tigers.

President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s government, which declared the ceasefire still intact, said the denial was hard to swallow. “We must get the international community to pressure the LTTE to stop these killings,” Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa said as most of the 15 parties represented in parliament issued a statement blaming the Tigers for the murder.

Investigators found cartridge casings from a sniper rifle, a grenade launcher, the remains of food and chocolate wrappers in the house from which Kadirgamar was shot in Colombo’s elegant diplomatic quarter.

They say the gunmen hid upstairs in the house and shot Kadirgamar twice in the head, once in the throat and once in chest. A Tamil couple who own the property are under house arrest for questioning, but have not been charged.

The 73-year-old Oxford-educated minister will be given a state funeral tomorrow. Shops and cinemas will close in respect.