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LTTE wrests back town from Lankan army

Sri Lanka's northern town of Killinochchi has fallen to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam after two days of fierce fighting, in a major setback to the government's military campaign against the rebels, informed sources in Colombo said today.

The sources, who regularly monitor the ongoing conflict in the island, said more than 500 combatants had died in the fighting, which started early Sunday and continued today.

They said hundreds of rebels, many of them women cadres, launched a major attack on the army defence line stretching from Paranthan to Killinochchi, the northern-most town on the mainland. Paranthan is about eight km north of Killinochchi.

Killinochchi was the political headquarters of the LTTE after they were driven out of their former bastion of Jaffna peninsula by the security forces in early 1996.

The town was captured by the troops after heavy fighting in September 1996.

''We were attacked from every side. About 1,500 terrorists were involved in the attack, mostly women cadres,'' one sources quoted a senior Sri Lankan military official as saying.

UNI

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