SLNS Ranaviru
Sri Lankan Navy gunboat
SLNS Ranaviru (Ranaviru, in Sinhalese: Warrior) was a Type 062 gunboat of the Sri Lanka Navy. Commissioned into the 3rd Fast Gun Boats Squadron in 1991, she was sunk by two Sea Tiger suicide crafts off the coast of Mullaitivu in 1996. On 19 July 1996, Ranaviru, under the command of Lieutenant Commander Parakrama Samaraweera, was dispatched to the seas off the coast of Mullaitivu where a Sri Lanka Army base was under siege as part of the Battle of Mullaitivu. She led the naval force that included Ranaviru, six Dvora-class fast patrol boats and the landing ship SLNS Shakthi, tasked with attempting an amphibious landing of a relief force to break the siege. Ranaviru was tasked with providing naval gun fire to cover the landing. Due to stiff resistance by coastal and sea units of the LTTE, the landing attempt was abandoned and landing ships began to withdraw.
Ranaviru began covering the withdrawal when it was hit by a Sea Tiger suicide craft which inflicted serious damage and disabled its propulsion. Samaraweera and the crew continued firing her guns and small arms until the disabled ship was hit by a second suicide craft resulting in a massive explosion that sank her. Of her crew of 36, only two survived to be rescued by other Sri Lanka Navy ships. Seven bodies were recovered amidst the sea battle.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q55632219. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1991 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “SLNS Ranaviru” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.