Several hundred anti-government supporters staged a rare protest Monday in Sri Lanka's capital to denounce a deadly army crackdown on villagers who were demonstrating against contaminated water supplies.

Around 300 followers of the left-wing JVP, or People's Liberation Front, shouted slogans and carried placards outside the Colombo Fort railway station against the regime of President Mahinda Rajapakse.

Sri Lanka has banned the latest issue of Time magazine over its cover story on Myanmar's Buddhist-Muslim clashes, which it said could hurt religious sentiment on the island, an official said Tuesday.

Customs department spokesman Leslie Gamini said they held the July 1 issue because it carried a photo of a prominent Myanmar monk under the headline: "The Face of Buddhist Terror".

Britain is planning to force visitors from India, Pakistan, Nigeria and other countries whose nationals are deemed to pose a "high risk" of immigration abuse to provide a cash bond before they can enter the country, a report said Sunday.

The Sunday Times newspaper said that from November, a pilot scheme would target visitors from those three countries plus Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Ghana.

A Sri Lankan Buddhist monk died Saturday of severe burns a day after setting himself on fire to protest the slaughter of cattle, an official said.

Bowatte Indaratna, 30, succumbed to his injuries at the National Hospital in Colombo where he was rushed Friday after his self-immolation bid in front of the highly venerated Temple of the Tooth in the central town of Kandy.

At least seven people have been killed and two are missing in floods and mudslides following heavy rain across Sri Lanka, the disaster management center said Wednesday.

A tropical cyclone east of the island did not make landfall but caused unusually heavy rain in the past two days which triggered flash floods, the Disaster Management Center said.

Sri Lanka freed an opposition Muslim political leader from police custody without charge after detaining him earlier in the week under a tough anti-terrorism law, his lawyer said Saturday.

Azath Sally, 49, the former deputy mayor of Colombo, was arrested on Sunday in what the minority Muslim community described as the latest attack on them in the Buddhist-dominated island nation.

Sri Lanka has detained an opposition Muslim political leader for 90 days under a tough anti-terrorism law, in what a leader of the minority community Monday described as the latest attack against them.

Azath Sally, 49, the former deputy mayor of Colombo and leader of the Muslim National Unity Alliance, was being held under a 90-day detention order, police spokesman Buddhika Siriwardena said.

A Sri Lankan court Tuesday freed three Buddhist monks and 14 others suspected of torching a Muslim-owned clothing store in an attack that scaled up the country's religious tensions.

In the latest in a wave of attacks targeting minority Muslims, an angry mob of hardline Buddhists vandalized and set fire to the store in a suburb of Colombo, leading police to boost security for Muslim businesses nationwide.

Sri Lankan troops and police commandos were deployed near the capital Thursday after an angry mob stormed a clothing store, officials said, in the latest in a wave of attacks targeting minority Muslims.

The mob comprising hundreds of Buddhist hardliners attacked a showroom of the Fashion Bug clothing chain outside Colombo late evening, setting merchandise on fire and smashing several vehicles parked outside, witnesses told Agence France Presse.

Sri Lanka denied entry to a British tourist sporting a Buddha tattoo on his arm because he showed disrespect to Buddhism, a newspaper report said Saturday.

The unnamed Briton was turned back at Bandaranaike International Airport late Friday, according to the daily Lankadeepa Sinhalese.