230 Tamil Tigers Killed in Major Rebel Attack

In the government’s first military success since a major rebel offensive last month, Sri Lankan troops repulsed a land-and-sea attack Saturday by hundreds of Tamil rebels.

Defense Ministry spokesman Brig. Sunil Tannekoon said 230 rebels and eight soldiers were killed in the fighting near a strategic northern military base. Afterward, the military reinforced its positions there, Tannekoon said.

“We are fully prepared to face any new threat,” he said.

The rebels did not mention losses in broadcasts on their clandestine Voice of Tigers Radio.

Saturday’s fighting erupted at Elephant Pass, a causeway that links the mainland with the northern Jaffna Peninsula. The military maintains a strategic base there as a first line of defense protecting Jaffna, a former rebel capital the government retook in 1996. The Elephant Pass, 180 miles north of the capital, Colombo, could provide the Tamil rebels with a platform to threaten Jaffna.

Tannekoon said rebel naval units, known as Sea Tigers, tried to land south of the base as their ground forces pounded the base with mortar fire. The military used jets and naval vessels to repel the attack, in which an estimated 700 to 1,000 rebels took part.

“We fought back the rebels very successfully, though they launched several attacks,” Tannekoon said.

Saturday’s military success came nearly six weeks after the guerrillas launched a lightning assault in the nearby Wanni jungle Nov. 2. They captured more than a dozen military camps and about 100 villages in one of their biggest military successes in the 16-year war.

War activity has shown signs of intensifying in recent weeks, ahead of Sri Lanka’s scheduled presidential election Dec. 21.

The rebels, officially known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, want a homeland for the minority Tamils in Sri Lanka’s north and east. They say they suffer discrimination at the hands of the majority Sinhalese.

More than 58,000 people have been killed since the fighting began in 1983 in this small island nation off India’s southern coast.