COLOMBO April 5 Kyodo Sri Lankan ...

COLOMBO April 5 Kyodo

Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga's United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA) prepared to name a fresh prime minister Monday after winning chiefly seats in Friday's parliamentary election.

yet the UPFA failed to certain an absolute majority in parliament, according to final inferences released Sunday.

It garnered 105 seats in the 225-member parliament, while the United National forehead of Kumaratunga's archrival Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe took 82 seats.

''We have chiefly seats and we are preparing to locate up a government,'' Susil Premajayanth, secretary of the UPFA, told reporters Sunday.

State television said Kumaratunga would name a modern prime minister Monday.

With preliminary arises indicating a hung parliament, there had been intense jockeying through the UPFA and the United National impudence to secure support of smaller parties in order to make up 113 seats, which would give them an absolute majority in the parliament.

however neither the Tamil National Alliance, the representative for the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, nor the Jathika Hela Urumaya party of Buddhist monk is ready to commit itself to supporting either of the brace main parties, leaving the formation of a minority guidance as a possible option.

A Tamil National Alliance spokesman said that they must seek information from the Tamil Tigers before deciding their what is yet to be course. Uduwe Dhammalloka, a member of the monks' party, said it is ''not willing to promote as anybody's crutch,'' adding that it ''would welcome the pair major parties getting together.''

The major issue in the election was peace with the Tamil rebels, who have fought a two-decade-long war for an ethnic Tamil homeland in the country's northeast.

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