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At least two soldiers and 35 Tamil Tigers were killed yesterday in a fierce battle, which was the first open confrontation between the government troops and the Tamil Tiger rebels after the Norway brokered ceasefire, defense officials said.

 

Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe, the Defense Ministry spokesman, said, "We have lost two soldiers while killing 35 LTTErs (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam)."

 

He said the fighting with mortar and artillery fire was still going on through mid afternoon as the army advanced its way toward an irrigation sluice gate forcibly shut down by the Tiger rebels in the eastern provinces' Verugal area.

 

The troops began its advance Sunday and got bogged down as the area was believed to have been laid with mines by the LTTE rebels. The sluice gate located in the rebel held territory was shut down by the LTTE on July 20 cutting water supplies to the villagers in the government held territory, which they claimed was a response to the government's reneging of a pledge to build a water tower to provide drinking water to the civilians in the rebel territory.

 

Some 15,000 families and 30,000 acres of agricultural land were deprived of water due to rebel action, which the government has claimed "a crime against humanity."

 

The rebel sources said that their Trincomalee district leader Elilan had written to the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM), the international truce monitoring group asking if the government's troops advance and the pounding of rebel positions using Israeli built Kfir jets indicated the end of the February 2002 ceasefire accord.

 

Keheliya Rambukwella, the minister of policy planning and the government's defense spokesman, said that despite the troops advancement the government was still committed to the truce agreement.

 

"It was only a humanitarian mission to restore the basic need of water to civilians", Rambukwella said.

 

The ceasefire and the process of face-to-face negotiations to end the armed separatist conflict have been hit by the escalation of violence since the beginning of December 2005. More than 64,000 people were killed in the conflict since the mid 1980s with the LTTE rebels waging war to create a separate homeland for the minority Tamils in the northern and eastern regions.

 

(Xinhua News Agency August 1, 2006)