NEW DELHI — Reclusive Tamil Tiger chief Velupillai Prabhakaran had narrowly escaped death several times during the last three decades even as his obsession with security ensured that untold other assassins never got close.
But on Monday, in northern Sri Lanka, the chubby, mustached 54-year-old leader's time ran out. According to government reports, he was killed along with two top aides as they tried to escape in an ambulance during the final throes of fighting between the Sri Lankan military and the ethnic militant group he led.
The government of Sri Lanka quickly declared victory in its quarter-century war against the Tigers, who sought a homeland for marginalized Tamils in the Sinhalese-majority nation.
A pro-rebel website denied that Prabhakaran was dead.
During his epic career as a rebel, Prabhakaran created one of the most ruthless and sophisticated insurgencies, with many of the tactics he pioneered becoming standard procedure for militant groups around the world.
Along the way, he refined the use of suicide bombings, offered tactical inspiration to Al Qaeda and Hamas and ordered up the assassination of political leaders, including onetime Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
As news of the leader's death spread over state television and in government text messages, civilians in the capital city of Colombo danced, sang and lighted fireworks.
But some within the Tamil community, which accounts for about 12% of the island nation's 20 million people, were wary that nationalist triumphalism could spark acts of vengeance against them -- and felt they had lost their only defender against state brutality, as flawed as he was.
Merciless, focused and innovative, Prabhakaran built the Tigers in his image. The group grew in less than a decade from little more than a street gang into one of the world's most successful militant operations.
At its peak, the group controlled one-third of Sri Lanka, had its own sizable army and navy, a nascent air force, courts, tax collectors, hospitals, smuggling operations and liaison offices in 54 countries. Its innovations included the use of suicide vests lined with C-4 plastic explosives, recruiting female suicide bombers and perfecting political terror.
Tiger naval operations reportedly inspired Al Qaeda's 2000 attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole. Until the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Tigers, known formally as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, reportedly carried out two-thirds of all suicide attacks in the world.
