LTTE LEADER PRABHAKARAN IS CONFIRMED DEAD

COLOMBO – SRI Lanka’s president proclaimed victory over the Tamil Tigers on Tuesday after decades of civil war, with state television showing what it said was the corpse of rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. The images were shown after the Tigers announced the guerrilla leader was still alive and well, and that they would continue fighting for a separate Tamil homeland despite President Mahinda Rajapakse’s call to unite the nation.

Under international pressure to reach out to the Tamil minority, Mr Rajapakse vowed in a nationally televised speech that ‘terrorism’ had been defeated and that a political solution to the island’s ethnic divisions would be found. ‘We are a government that defeated terrorism at a time when others told us that it was not possible,’ the president said. ‘The writ of the state now runs across every inch of our territory.’

With the end of a civil war that began when Prabhakaran founded the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 1972, Mr Rajapakse stressed that their defeat did not mean subjugation for the country’s Tamils. ‘All should live with equal rights. They should live without any fear or doubt,’ he said. ‘Let us all be united.’ His speech had been shadowed by a Tiger statement insisting that Mr Prabhakaran was not dead.

_45794569_body_grab226 But the army chief, General Sarath Fonseka, responded by reaffirming that Mr Prabhakaran had been shot dead on Monday, and state television showed footage of what it said was his body. The images showed the upper section of a corpse which was dressed in camouflage fatigues. Part of the forehead was covered with a blue cloth, and the head was resting on a bloodstained newspaper.

The face was intact, with the eyes wide open, and bore a clear resemblance to the rebel leader, an AFP correspondent said. The conflicting accounts of the Tiger leader’s fate came after a dramatic day that effectively ended one of Asia’s oldest and most brutal ethnic conflicts. — AFP