Sri Lanka celebrates as rebel leader dies

SRI LANKA declared it had crushed the Tamil Tiger rebels, killing their chief, Velupillai Prabhakaran, and ending his three-decade quest for an independent homeland for minority Tamils.

State television broke into its regular programming to announce Prabhakaran’s death, and the government information department sent a text message to phones across the country confirming he was killed along with top deputies, Soosai and Pottu Amman.

The announcement sparked mass celebrations around the country, and people poured into the streets of Colombo dancing and singing. Prabhakaran’s death has been seen as crucial to bringing closure to the war-wracked Indian Ocean island nation. If he had escaped, he could have used his large international smuggling network and the support of Tamil expatriates to spark a new round of guerrilla warfare. His death in battle could still turn him into a martyr for other Tamil separatists.

While Velupillai Prabhakaran was a hero to some, his group was branded a terrorist organisation by the US and European Union, and it was accused of waging hundreds of suicide attacks, including the 1991 assassination of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi by a female bomber. The rebels also forcibly recruited child soldiers. Sri Lanka’s army chief, Lieutenant General Sareth Fonseka, said his troops routed the last rebels from the northern war zone yesterday morning.

“We can announce very responsibly that we have liberated the whole country from terrorism,” he told state television. President Mahinda Rajapaksa confirmed Prabhakaran’s death in a phone call to India’s external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee, an Indian foreign affairs spokesman said.

Senior military officials said troops closed in on Prabhakaran and his final cadre early yesterday in what developed into a two-hour firefight, military officials said. Troops fired a rocket at the van in which they were trying to flee, ending the battle, they said. In addition to Prabhakaran, the attack also killed Soosai, the head of the rebels’ naval wing, and Pottu Amman, the group’s feared intelligence commander, they said.

One of Prabhakaran’s sons was also killed, the military said. Suren Surendiran, a spokesman for the British Tamils’ Forum, the largest organisation for expatriate Tamils in Britain, said the community was in despair.

“The people are very sombre and very saddened. But we are ever determined and resilient to continue our struggle for Eelam,” he said, invoking the name of the Tamils hoped-for independent state. But in Colombo, which had suffered countless rebel bombings, people set off fireworks, danced and sang in the streets.

“Myself and most of my friends gathered here have narrowly escaped bombs set off by the Tigers. Some of our friends were not lucky,” said Lal Hettige, 47, a businessman celebrating in Colombo’s outdoor market. “We are happy today to see the end of that ruthless terrorist organisation and its heartless leader. We can live in peace after this.”

The chubby, mustachioed Prabhakaran turned what was little more than a street gang in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most feared insurgencies.

Government forces ousted the rebels from their strongholds in the north in recent months and brought the group to its knees. Thousands of civilians were reportedly killed in the recent fighting. Senior diplomats had appealed for a humanitarian ceasefire in recent weeks to safeguard the tens of thousands of civilians trapped in the war zone, but the government refused, and denied persistent reports it was shelling the densely populated war zone.

Three Sri Lankan doctors – whose harrowing reports from the war zone were some of the only to reach the outside world in recent weeks – were detained on accusations they gave false information to the media, a health official said yesterday.

Diplomats in Brussels said the EU will endorse a call for an independent war crimes investigation into the killing of civilians in Sri Lanka. The rebels were also accused of using the civilians as human shields and shooting at some who fled.

The UN said 7,000 civilians were killed in the fighting between January 20 and May 7.

Health officials in the area said more than a 1,000 others were killed since then.