SRI Lanka troops yesterday captured the last major town controlled by Tamil Tiger guerrillas after a week long battle in which 255 soldiers and 750 rebels died, the defence ministry said.
Thousands of troops poured in to the town of Kilinochchi in northern Sri Lanka yesterday after smashing the defences of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the chief military spokesman, Mr Sarath Munasinghe, said.
Military analysts said the fall of Kilinochchi was a significant breakthrough in the government's battle against the LTTE, and that the rebels would now be restricted to small villages and vast tracts of jungles.
However, analysts said the Tigers were highly committed fighters who were prepared to commit suicide to avoid capture, and had a formidable capacity to keep up devastating guerrilla attacks.
There was no immediate word from the Tigers but the fall of the town was not totally unexpected after the rebels destroyed the local telecom tower on Friday.
Military officials said then that the move signalled the imminent withdrawal of the guerrillas who would not want to leave useful assets behind.
"All the shops in Kilinochchi had been looted by the time we got in," Mr Munasinghe said. "All the good buildings had been blasted to deprive us of using them as shelters for troops."
The battle for Kilinochchi, the political headquarters of the LTTE, was launched on September 22nd with the deployment of some 20,000 government soldiers backed by tanks, artillery and aircraft.
Official figures show that 255 soldiers and about 750 rebels were killed in the fighting, regarded as the bloodiest in years. The Tigers have rejected the military estimates of their losses.
Before soldiers broke into Kilinochchi, the air force used Israeli built Kfir supersonic jets to bomb a key rebel base and killed an estimated 30 Tigers, officials said.
The final push came as the army opened a third front to pressure the guerrillas defending the town which had served as their headquarters since the fall of Jaffna in December.
Mr Munasinghe said the military's main achievement was depriving the Tigers of the control they had exercised over some 200,000 Tamil civilians in the region.
Most civilians in Kilinochchi fled in the face of the military offensive and sought shelter further south, and the rebels would not be able to tax them any more, he said.
In December, the security forces captured the northern town of Jaffna which had been the capital of the de facto state run by the Tigers. That battle, which lasted 50 days, cost the lives of 500 soldiers.
After the town's fall the LTTE moved its political headquarters' in Kilinochchi.
The Tigers fiercely resisted the military onslaught over the past week because they had no fallback town after Kilinochchi, military officials said.