COLOMBO - THE Sri Lankan government on Monday declared an end to 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 overran the last sliver of Tiger territory, killing the last 300 fighters and decimating the rebel leadership. It said Prabhakaran and two deputies were shot dead trying to flee in a van and ambulance.
UN calls for war crimes probe into casualties
BRUSSELS: While Sri Lanka is celebrating success in its decades-long conflict with the Tamil Tigers, the international community wants answers about how victory was achieved.
According to the United Nations, the Sri Lankan government's moment of triumph has come at the cost of thousands of innocent lives lost in indiscriminate shelling, and the UN's rights body now wants a war crimes probe.
Shy boy who became rebel leader and ruthless dictator
COLOMBO: To his followers, Velupillai Prabhakaran was the steadfast heart of the battle to establish a breakaway state for Sri Lanka's ethnic Tamil minority. To his many detractors, he was an egomaniacal and brutal ruler of a suicide cult who repeatedly sabotaged peace deals in his pursuit of power.
But few would dispute that the 54-year-old transformed a small band of poorly armed rebels into one of the world's most sophisticated and ruthless insurgencies, before a string of miscalculations led his Tamil Tigers to total defeat at the hands of the Sri Lankan military.
NEW DELHI: In early 2006, shortly after he took charge as Sri Lanka's Defence Secretary in his brother's Cabinet, Mr Gotabhaya Rajapakse submitted a long list of expensive war equipment he wanted to purchase.
Many, including newly installed President Mahinda Rajapakse, were surprised.
'We have successfully ended the war,' the island's powerful defence secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapakse, told the president on Monday in a nationally televised ceremony.
Army chief Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka also declared an end to all combat operations.
'Prabhakaran's body is among the 300 terrorist bodies that we captured,' General Fonseka said on state television. '"Now the entire country is declared rid of terrorism.'
The statements 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 killed in a final showdown on a lagoon and jungle peninsula on the northeast coast.
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.
The capital Colombo, which has been frequently hit by Tiger suicide attacks over the past quarter century, witnessed massive street celebrations - with residents setting off firecrackers and waving flags.
'This is a victory against terrorism. I am very proud of our forces, of what they have done,' said Ashani de Silva, a Colombo student, as national flags were put up over shops, homes, offices and cars. -- AFP
