Paris-based Action Against Hunger, or ACF, said 11 men and four women, all Sri Lankans, had been killed in the town of Muttur, where they helped survivors of the December 2004 tsunami and people affected by violence between troops and Tamil rebels.

"Our Muttur office had been providing safe drinking water to the people in the area and from early this year we were also providing relief to people affected by the escalating violence," ACF head of mission in Sri Lanka, Eric Fort, told AFP in Colombo.

There was no claim of responsibility for the massacre of the aid workers from the minority Tamil community, but the Tamil Tiger rebels accused the government while the military pointed fingers at the Tigers.

"We did not have people in that area at the time they were supposed to have been killed," government military spokesman Upali Rajapakse said. "Their office is not located in an area where we carried out artillery attacks."

But rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) official S. Puleedevan said the army did it. "This massacre of aid workers was carried out by security forces," Puleedevan said.

With the situation increasingly becoming dangerous for aid workers, Fort said ACF officers were expected from Paris shortly to make an assessment.

However, he said the organisation had been working in Sri Lanka's conflict-affected north and east for the past decade and had not been a target for either side.

ACF has 218 workers in Sri Lanka, mostly Sri Lankans. About 15 are expatriates currently deployed across the island's north-east.

Fort said the group's offices are painted white with ACF logos and staff wear white T-shirts carrying ACF prints.

With a current annual budget of 2.6 million euros (3.3 million dollars) the organisation provided drinking water in coastal areas hit by the tsunami as well as humanitarian assistance to thousands of internally displaced people.

"We got involved in tsunami relief operations while keeping up our other work of helping people affected by the conflict," Fort said.

The office in Muttur, a coastal fishing town of mostly minority Muslims, had a staff of 16. Half were from the area itself while the others came from Trincomalee, the main port town in the northeast.

"The 15 people who were killed are the ones who were accommodated within our own premises," Fort said. "The others are residents of Muttur, but after the clashes we have managed to make contact with only a few of them."

Benoit Miribel, the director general of ACF, said they were stunned by the killings which were unprecedented in the organisation's 25-year history.

"We are trying to send a team to find out what is going on in this area," Miribel told AFP in Paris. "But soldiers have prevented us from entering the town which remains completely sealed off."

The main fighting erupted on July 26 when planes bombed suspected Tiger positions in a bid to force the rebels to lift their blockade of an irrigation canal that also supplies water to Muttur.

At least 27 Muslim civilian also perished when their shelters were bombed during clashes last week. Thousands have fled while a large number is still trapped in the town.

Heavy fighting since July has claimed the lives of at least 425 people in a country where more than 60,000 have been killed in the Tamil separatist conflict since 1972.

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