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Sri Lanka confirms Tamil Tiger leader dead

(China Daily/Agencies)
Updated: 2009-05-20 10:22

COLOMBO -- Sri Lanka's military Tuesday said Tamil Tiger leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran's body had been found, and President Mahinda Rajapaksa urged Tamils to join in rebuilding a nation split by a 25-year separatist war.

Soldiers of the Sri Lankan army stand over the body of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran as it lies on a stretcher after being found at Nanthikadal lagoon, near the town of Mullaittivu in northern Sri Lanka May 19, 2009. [Agencies]

Footage broadcast on Sri Lankan TV showed what appeared to be the corpse of the man who plunged the Indian Ocean island nation into one of the world's most intractable wars, his eyes open, face bloated and the top of his head blown off.

The military declared total victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) on Monday, putting the Indian Ocean island nation back under government rule for the first time since the war erupted in 1983 after a cataclysmic final battle.

With a war long viewed as unwinnable now over, Rajapaksa gave a speech in parliament promising major development in the formerly Tiger-controlled areas in northern Sri Lanka and pledging to protect the rights of Tamils.

"It is necessary that the political solutions they need should be brought to them," he said. "However, it cannot be an imported solution ... it is necessary that we find a solution that is our very own, of our own nation."

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He pledged rapid resettlement of the more than 250,000 Tamils now in internment camps and urged international investors to come to Sri Lanka and invest in its rebuilding

"This is our country, this is our motherland. We should live in this country as children of one mother. No differences of race, caste and religion should prevail here," Rajapaksa, who is Sinhalese, said in Tamil.

Tamils complain of marginalization by successive governments led by the Sinhalese ethnic majority, which came to power at independence in 1948 and took the favored position the minority Tamils had enjoyed under the British colonial government.

Later, Army commander General Sarath Fonseka for the first time gave official confirmation of Prabhakaran's death, shortly after a pro-rebel website said he was "alive and safe".

"The good news from the war front is that the body of the leader of the terrorist organization which destroyed the country for the last 30 years, Prabhakaran, has been found this morning by the army. We have identified the body," Fonseka said.

Moments later, private TV stations Derana and Swarnavahini showed soldiers surrounding what they said was Prabhakaran's body, with his trademark moustache and distinctive Tiger stripe camouflage fatigues.

Reuters

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