COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Four top Tamil Tiger officials, including the supreme leader’s eldest son, were killed in Sri Lanka’s northern war zone, the military announced today, after the insurgents said their quarter-century fight had reached its “bitter end.”
With top rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran still at large, the threat of renewed guerrilla warfare remained, but Sri Lankans already had begun to celebrate the stunning collapse of one of the world’s most sophisticated insurgencies.
Thousands gathered in the streets of the capital, Colombo, to dance, sing and set off fireworks after Tiger official Selvarasa Pathmanathan admitted the group’s defeat Sunday.
“This battle has reached its bitter end,” Pathmanathan said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press. “It is our people who are dying now from bombs, shells, illness and hunger. We cannot permit any more harm to befall them. We remain with one last choice — to remove the last weak excuse of the enemy for killing our people. We have decided to silence our guns.”
Military spokesman Udaya Nanayakkara said today that troops had found the body of Prabhakaran’s eldest son, Charles Anthony, who was said to be the head of the rebels’ air wing.
Prabhakaran has three children, and Charles Anthony — named after a rebel leader who died earlier in the war — was the only one thought to be fighting along with his father.
Separately, the military said special forces found the bodies of the rebels’ political-wing leader, Balasingham Nadesan; the head of the rebels’ peace secretariat, Seevaratnam Puleedevan; and a top military leader known as Ramesh.
The rebels have been fighting since 1983 for a separate state for Sri Lanka’s ethnic Tamil minority after years of marginalization at the hands of the Sinhalese majority. More than 70,000 people have been killed in the fighting.
