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The video frame grab shows what the Sri Lankan military says is the body of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran - Source: Reuters -
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The Tamil Tigers have admitted for the first time that their leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was killed a week ago by Sri Lankan government troops.
"We announce today with inexpressible sadness and heavy hearts that our incomparable leader, the supreme commander of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), attained martyrdom fighting the Sri Lankan government," the rebels' chief of international relations, Selvarasa Pathmanathan said in a statement on Monday.
"His final request was for the struggle to continue until we achieved the freedom for his people."
Pathmanathan had told the pro-rebel website Tamilnet that Prabhakaran, the founder and leader of the Tigers, was "safe and well", prompting the government to broadcast footage of his corpse.
Monday's statement from the rebels said Prabhakaran was killed on May 17, a day before the government said he died.
The military announced Prabhakaran, 54, was shot on May 18, when trying to escape a final government assault and his body was formally identified the following day.
The Sri Lankan authorities have not published a post-mortem examination report or officially confirmed how or when he died.
A government spokesman said Prabhakaran's body would be given to an undertaker but army chief General Sarath Fonseka told the privately-run Sunday Rivira that the body had been cremated and the ashes thrown into the sea.
Prabhakaran first took up arms against Sri Lanka's ethnic Sinhalese-majority in 1972, with the island slipping into full-scale ethnic war in the early 1980s.
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