About 15 masked men broke into Leader Publications' printing plant in suburban Colombo early Wednesday and ordered the workers to kneel down outside before setting the machines on fire, company head Lal Wickramatunga said.

The company publishes The Sunday Leader, The Morning Leader, a weekly newspaper and a Sinhalese-language Sunday newspaper which are critical of President Mahinda Rajapaksa's government and support the opposition.

"Armed men have once again attacked an independent news media in a high-security area of the capital," the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders said.

"It unfortunately shows that the press freedom enemies have accomplices within the security forces," the group said in a statement. It said the attackers "wanted to silence one of the main sources of incisive criticism of the current government."

Military spokesman Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara denied that security forces willingly let the gang enter the high-security zone and escape after attacking the newspaper.

Police spokesman Jayantha Wickramaratne said an initial investigation had not revealed those behind the attack.

A gang burned the same printing plant two years ago and the case remains unsolved, Wickramatunga said.

A separate media watchdog group, the International Press Institute, said Sri Lanka was included in its list of countries where media freedom is under fire because journalists were being targeted as the country's civil war has intensified in recent years.

So far this year, three journalists have been killed in the island nation, the IPI said. Five were killed last year, two in 2005 and two in 2004, it said.

Government pressure on journalists in Sri Lanka has increased, and authorities have been slow to investigate slayings and other violent attacks on journalists, the Vienna-based watchdog said.

Sri Lanka has been embroiled in a civil war that has killed more than 70,000 since 1983, when separatist rebels launched a campaign to create a separate homeland for ethnic minority Tamils after a history of discrimination by governments controlled by majority Sinhalese.

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