Colombo, February 3: Tragedy struck Sri Lanka when a blast at Colombo's main railway station killed 11 people and injured 103 Sunday - the eve of the country's 60th Independence Day.

"A female suicide bomber blasted herself on platform number three of the Fort railway station around 2.10 pm. Eleven people were killed and 103 were injured. A couple of compartments of a passenger train scheduled to ply between Colombo and Ambepussa were damaged," said Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, a military spokesman.

Bleeding and wailing men, women, children and policemen were immediately rushed to the Colombo National Hospital by security personnel and others present at the station.

Battered bodies, stripped off their clothes, lay strewn over a section of the blood-splattered platform. Bags, shoes and other luggage were scatted over a wider area.

Splinters from the bomb had badly dented some compartments of the train standing at the platform. But the train itself did not suffer much damage.

Radio and television reports said that the female suicide bomber triggered the belt bomb when the police were routinely checking passengers, train compartments and the platform for bombs.

Apparently the bomber, a young Tamil woman, had arrived by train from Medawachchia, a town in north Sri Lanka between Anuradhapura and Vavuniya, media reports said.

Train services from the Fort railway station were, however, resumed by 5 p.m., a railway spokesman said.

The blast occurred even as Colombo was under tight security, with over 5,000 personnel from the three services and the police being deployed in all sensitive parts of the city in view of the Independence Day celebrations Monday.

Earlier, a grenade had gone off in a zoo in Dehiwela, just outside Colombo, injuring four people, the military spokesman said.

On Saturday, a bomb planted in a passenger bus in Dambulla, 148 km north of the capital, killed 20 people and injured 50. Most of the victims were Buddhist pilgrims.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa blamed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) for the blasts and said that the Tamil terrorist group's primary aim was to trigger a "communal backlash" or an anti-Tamil riot.

Most of those killed in the recent bomb blasts, except the one near Madu earlier in the week, have been from the majority Sinhalese community.

Over 700 people have lost their lives in Sri Lanka in the continuing violence since the government unilaterally withdrew from a Norwegian-backed truce pact with the LTTE Jan 16.