Bodies of soldiers handed over to Army

In a statement on Friday, the LTTE said it had killed 300 soldiers and recovered the bodies of 133. Of these, 113, which were in good condition, were handed over to the ICRC, while the Tigers had cremated 20 soldiers whose bodies had become unidentifiable.

Thirty-five LTTE fighters, including 10 women, were killed in the “successful counter-offensive”, the LTTE said, claiming to have taken away “huge amounts” of arms and ammunition from the Army.

The broadcast over Voice of tigers, the LTTE clandestine radio monitored in Vavuniya, listed the weapons and ammunition taken away by its fighters from the Special Forces commandoes with whom they clashed on Thursday.

The list included five general purpose machine guns, five rocket propelled grenade (RPG) launchers, 13 pistols of 40mm calibre, 148 AK-47s, and more than 41,000 rounds of ammunition.While the Sri Lankan government maintains that the LTTE gets most of its arms supplies from abroad, military officials admit that during this operation, the Army may have been the biggest supplier of weapons to militants during counter-attacks like this one.

The Defence Ministry, however, rejected the LTTE’s claims and said rebel casualties were “very large”. The Ministry said the Tigers gave the names of 102 of their cadres killed over their internal radio communications.

There is no official word yet on the number of soldiers killed in Thursday’s fierce combat near Kanakarayankulam in the Vanni region, but it is believed that including the bodies given to the Army today, it could be as high as 160, with the injured numbering many more.

Defence sources said security forces lost at least 148 soldiers, mostly from the elite Special Forces commando unit, and speculated the LTTE suffered an equal number of losses despite rebel claims to the contrary.

They said more fighters were reported missing, with an initial estimate of least 300 dead on both sides from fighting near the town of Kanakarayankulam.

Soldiers and LTTE combatants fought pitched battles near Kanakarayankulam, 30 km north of Vavuniya, through Thursday after the military attempted to resume its advance towards Mankulam in its bid to secure a major supply route to Jaffna through territory held by the Tamil Tigers.

The military offensive to secure this land route, code-named Operation Jaya Sekuru, has proved to be the costliest in the country’s 14-year-old ethnic war, for both sides. Nearly 1,000 soldiers have died since May, when the offensive began, and according to the Defence Ministry, twice that number of LTTE cadres have also perished. Thousands have been injured on both sides.Thursday’s attack was the bloodiest in a series of counter-attacks by the LTTE since Operation Jaya Sekuru began.

In July 1996, the Army had refused to accept the bodies of hundreds of soldiers which the LTTE had handed over to the ICRC after it overran the Mullaitivu military base, killing more than 1,200 soldiers.

The Army refused to accept the bodies on the ground that they were badly mutilated and could not be identified.The latest upsurge in violence came on the second anniversary of the fall of the Jaffna peninsula, the former heartland of the LTTE. Jaffna, the symbol of Tamil separatism, was captured by security forces in December 1995.