Liberation Tigers Of Tamil Elam

Haribabu was the doer of odd jobs, a two-bit free-lance photographer who lived in a tiny hut with his parents, borrowed his cameras and film and hardly could have known that the job he took for $5 last month would leave behind the only crucial, physical clues to one of India's most brazen political assassinations. The 21-year-old Haribabu was killed in the process.

Sri Lanka's victory this week after a 25-year battle against the Tamil Tiger rebels represents a rare success story for governments fighting insurgencies. Even as leaders in Colombo, the capital, declared a national holiday and citizens danced in the streets, military planners and analysts around the world began scrutinizing the war for lessons on how to fight Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other militant groups.

He was blindfolded, his arms were tied and he was forced face down in the dirt with more than 100 other police officers, but Alm Tahir says he was most frightened by the mocking laughter of his would-be executioners. "The women and girls were laughing and clapping," Tahir, 21, recalled Monday from his hospital bed here. "Then they shot us." Police Sub-Inspector Piyeratna Ranaweera remembers another sound when the shooting began.

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.

The Sri Lankan Tamil militant believed to have masterminded the assassination of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi was found dead after a siege of his hideout, top police officials said today. The one-eyed man identified as Sivarasan and six others, one an alleged woman accomplice, committed suicide by swallowing cyanide, they said. Sivarasan also had a bullet wound in the head.

Sri Lanka's victory this week after a 25-year battle against the Tamil Tiger rebels represents a rare success story for governments fighting insurgencies. Even as leaders in Colombo, the capital, declared a national holiday and citizens danced in the streets, military planners and analysts around the world began scrutinizing the war for lessons on how to fight Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other militant groups.

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.

Government bombing attacks killed about 100 Tamil rebels Tuesday in a military effort to rescue 400 soldiers and police trapped in a military camp in the north of the country, military officials said. The attacks came a day after air force helicopters dropped thousands of leaflets asking civilians to evacuate the area and warning them of the dangers of remaining.

The Sri Lankan army's plan was for "Operation Sunshine" to have scored a decisive victory by now. Instead, the nation's civil war is slogging grimly on, with many doubting that even a knockout success by government forces will end the bloodshed any time soon. On Monday, 42 days into an offensive launched by the army to capture the Tamil rebels' northern heartland and the coastal city that has been their de facto capital for five years, the advance had visibly slowed--and perhaps stalled.

Government forces neared the Tamil Tiger rebels' main town in fighting that left 29 guerrillas and five soldiers dead, the Sri Lankan military said. The army says its soldiers are slightly more than a mile from the outer limits of the rebels' administrative capital, Kilinochchi. Rebel officials could not be contacted for comment because most communication lines to guerrilla-dominated areas have been severed.

The president declared victory Saturday in Sri Lanka's quarter-century civil war with the Tamil Tigers rebels. But the group's top leaders remained at large as troops and the insurgents fought fierce battles across the war zone. A triumph on the battlefield appeared inevitable after government forces captured the last bit of coastline under rebel control early Saturday, surrounding the remaining Tamil fighters in a 1.2-square mile strip of land.

Artillery shells tore through a hospital packed with wounded civilians in Sri Lanka's war zone for a second day Wednesday, killing at least 50 people, setting an ambulance on fire and forcing the medical staff to huddle in bunkers for safety, doctors said.

A mortar shell struck the only functioning medical facility in Sri Lanka's northern war zone today, killing 47 patients and bystanders and wounding more than 50 others, rebels and a health worker said. The attack came after a weekend of heavy shelling that killed hundreds of civilians, which the United Nations labeled a "blood bath." The military has denied that it was shelling the tiny coastal strip still under rebel control, which is packed with an estimated 50,000 civilians.

A suicide bomber in Sri Lanka attacked a Muslim religious procession Tuesday, killing at least 13 people and injuring more than three dozen, including a government minister, officials said. The army blamed the Tamil Tigers separatist group, which for a quarter of a century has been fighting for a homeland in the northern part of the South Asian island nation. Tiger militants, formally known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, are on their heels.

The chief of U.N. humanitarian efforts urged Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels Friday to let tens of thousands of civilians leave the South Asian country's war zone, saying there were "credible reports" that some people trying to flee had been shot. John Holmes also called on the Sri Lankan government to allow civilians to leave safely, either by agreeing to a temporary cease-fire or allowing a humanitarian corridor for safe passage through the front lines in the island's northeast.

The white tattered strips line the main road to Kuliyapitiya, hanging off telephone poles and fence posts, each one signifying another funeral, another loss, another hole punched in the heart of a family. A few miles away, in the center of town, ribbons of another sort decorate the chest of a commando at a recruiting post working to impress a group of teenage boys.

Clashes between Sri Lankan security forces and Tamil militants left at least 32 rebels dead, 12 of them killed when helicopter gunships strafed a hide-out in northern Sri Lanka, a senior military official said Thursday. The violence occurred on the second day of a 3-day-old major offensive aimed at breaking rebel control of the area surrounding a 300-year-old Dutch fort in the city of Jaffna, where 200 government troops have been trapped since mid-June.

Tamil Tiger guerrillas claimed to have inflicted "a humiliating military debacle" on government troops Saturday, driving them out of newly captured territory in a battle that has left hundreds dead. A Defense Ministry statement confirmed that government troops had pulled back to their original positions in Eluthumadduval, 18 miles east of Jaffna, in the face of heavy rebel shelling. According to the government, three days of fighting have left 157 soldiers dead and 860 wounded.

The separatist Tamil Tiger rebels have forcibly recruited teenagers and a U.N. worker, and are shooting and killing people trying to flee the war, said Neil Buhne, United Nations resident coordinator for Sri Lanka. He did not give a number for the dead. Buhne said the rebels forcibly recruited one of 15 local U.N. employees into their ranks. Those 15 were physically barred from leaving the war zone last month, along with 75 dependents, including 40 children, he said.

As the Sri Lankan military tightens the noose around Tamil Tiger guerrillas, squeezing them into an increasingly tight pocket on the island's northeast coast, the government appears closer to winning the war than at almost any time since fighting began a quarter-century ago. Yet after the battle ends, it may prove nearly as difficult to win the peace, according to some analysts.