Sri Lankan Tamil leader Velupillai Prabhakaran killed

Sri Lanka's government said Monday its forces killed Tamil rebel chief Velupillai Prabhakaran as he attempted to flee, according to the country's state-run news agency.

There was no immediate response from the Tamil rebel group.

Prabhakaran founded the Tamil Tigers, which has been declared a terrorist organization by 32 countries. It pioneered the use of women in suicide attacks and, according to the FBI, invented the explosive suicide belt.

It was also behind the assassination of two world leaders -- the only terrorist organization to do so.

Prabhakaran is accused of masterminding the killing of then-Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 in the Tamil-dominated Indian state of Tami Nadu. Sri Lankan authorities allege that Prabhakaran was avenging Gandhi's decision to send Indian peacekeepers to Sri Lanka.

Two years later a Tigers suicide bomber, allegedly acting under Prabhakaran's orders, detonated explosives that killed Sri Lanka's then-president, Ranasinghe Premadasa, during a rally.

"Today we finished the work handed to us by the president to liberate the country from the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam)," army chief Lt Gen Sarath Fonseka said in the broadcast. 

Sri Lankan forces had routed the rebels in the past few weeks, over-running their territory and bringing the 26-year war to its conclusion. 
 

The broadcast quoted military officials as saying Prabhakaran had been killed along with his intelligence chief Pottu Amman and Soosai, the head of the rebels' naval wing. 

They were shot dead in an ambush in the Mullivaikal district while trying to escape the war zone in an ambulance, the general added. 

Earlier, at least three senior rebel leaders were killed, including Prabhakaran's eldest son, Charles Anthony, the military said. 

State TV broadcast images of what it said was Charles Anthony's body. 

Military spokesman Brig Udaya Nanayakkara confirmed Prabhakaran's death, saying 250 Tamil Tigers were also killed overnight. 

The government's information department also sent news of Prabhakaran's death by text message to mobile phones across the country. 

In the past few days, the LTTE had been hemmed into a 300 sq metre (3,230 sq ft) patch of land - a tiny part of the 15,000 sq km territory they had controlled until recently.