Sri Lankan Troops Break Siege on Fort

Government troops stormed ashore from a flotilla of rubber dinghies today and killed more than 100 Tamil rebels, breaking a siege of a colonial fort and rescuing a trapped garrison, military sources said.

More than 350 soldiers rowed before dawn across a lagoon to make their surprise assault on the 350-year-old Dutch fort in Jaffna on the northern tip of the island.

The landing party, backed by naval and air support, met strong resistance from Tamil separatist rebels who had besieged the star-shaped fort since June 11.

Planes and helicopter gunships bombed and strafed rebel positions around the garrison as the soldiers landed, the sources said. Naval vessels stood by off the coast.

More than 100 rebels of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and 12 members of the government force were killed in the first wave of fighting, officials said.

About 200 soldiers and police officers pinned down in the fort by almost daily rebel attacks were rescued, they said. Forty government soldiers were wounded.

The rebels, fighting to set up an independent homeland for the minority Tamil community, had fired on the base with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms since they began their new offensive.

“The fort is not a strategic base. But it was prestigious to hold it because it is in the heartland of the Tamils,” a military analyst said. “That is why the army fought hard to keep it and the Tigers tried equally hard to seize control of it.”

Earlier efforts to advance on the fort along a causeway leading across the lagoon to Jaffna had been thwarted by the Tigers, who planted hundreds of land mines and blew up a bridge.

The fort was one of a dozen military establishments and 30 police stations attacked by the Tigers in their renewed campaign to set up an independent homeland for the minority Tamil community in the northeast.