COLOMBO – Sri Lanka’s military declared a final victory yesterday in its decades-old conflict with the Tamil Tigers, after routing the remnants of the rebel army and killing its leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.
The army said its commandos had overrun the last sliver of Tiger territory, killing the last 300 fighters and decimating the rebel leadership. It said Prabhakaran and two deputies tried to flee in a van, but were shot dead.
‘All military operations have come to a stop,’ army chief Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka announced.
‘Now the entire country is declared rid of terrorism,’ Fonseka said, adding the ‘dead bodies of terrorists are scattered over the last ditch.’
His statement marked the end of one of Asia’s oldest and most brutal ethnic conflicts which left more than 70 000 dead from pitched battles, suicide attacks, bomb strikes and assassinations.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) emerged in the 1970s, with all-out war breaking out in the early 1980s as they pursued their struggle for an independent Tamil homeland on the Sinhalese-majority island.
Officials said all rebel leaders were now dead.
A senior defence ministry official told AFP that Prabhakaran and his two deputies had tried to flee advancing troops in an ambulance and another van but were ambushed by commandos.
‘He was killed with two others inside the vehicle,’ the official said.
State television and the office of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse confirmed the news.
The pro-rebel Tamilnet website said the LTTE leadership had appealed to the Red Cross to be evacuated, and that ‘initial reports indicate a determined massacre by the Sri Lanka Army.’
In a dramatic announcement, the Tamil guerrillas had acknowledged on Sunday that their battle for an independent ethnic homeland had reached its ‘bitter end’ – signalling Asia’s longest running civil war was all but over.
The separatist rebels were once one of the world’s most feared guerrilla armies, and ran a de facto mini-state spanning a third of the island before the government began a major offensive two years ago.
A last-gasp appeal for peace talks – rather than a surrender – was flatly rejected by the government, and the defence ministry sent in troops with a brief to capture ‘every inch of land’ for the first time in decades of war.
Rajapakse will open a new session of parliament today with an address that will officially mark the end of the war.
– Nampa-AFP
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