-
Source: Reuters
Sri Lankan soldiers have entered the last town held by the Tamil
Tiger separatists and were battling to take full control of it, the
military said.
Soldiers from the 58th Division entered Puthukudiyiruppu Township
after heavy fighting.
That is the last actual town the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam (LTTE) still control; after that there are only a handful of
small coastal villages left.
"They are inside Puthukudiyiruppu and fighting to take control,"
defence spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella, also a minister,
said.
On Monday, Reuters was at the frontline just to the west of the
town centre, where 58 Division commander, Brigadier Shavendra
Silva, said: "It's the last objective."
Silva at the time said he was measuring the war in days, and not
weeks.
His soldiers now have less than six km to go before they reach a
12-km long no-fire zone the army established on the Indian Ocean
island's northeast coast.
It is there that he and other commanders expect a final showdown
with the LTTE, the final act in a war that began in earnest in 1983
and is now Asia's longest-running.
Slowing the offensive is the presence of tens of thousands of
civilians there, the military said.
Witnesses who have escaped have said the Tigers were shooting
people who tried to flee and making others stay and fight.
The military says there are no more than 70,000 people inside the
sliver of a war zone that is left, while aid agencies estimate it
to be around 200,000.
Among those people are the commanders of the LTTE, the military
says.
The group is on US, EU, Canadian and Indian terrorism lists for
their widespread use of the suicide bomb to kill enemies,
politicians and civilians alike.
Meanwhile, the military said police in the eastern port of
Trincomalee said they had recovered an SAM-14 surface-to-air
missile suspected to have been hidden by the LTTE.
Despite having an arsenal impressive even by formal military
standards, that particular weapon has been noticeably missing from
the battlefield amid repeated air force helicopter strikes that
have helped propel the swift offensive.
The LTTE said on Monday it would accept a ceasefire, but not
surrender and urged the international community to try and secure
the former.
The government has said the Tigers must surrender or be
destroyed.
The LTTE say they are fighting to establish a separate state for
Sri Lanka's Tamil minority, which complains of decades of
mistreatment by successive governments led by the Sinhalese ethnic
majority since independence from Britain in 1948.
