Sri Lanka confirms Tamil Tiger leader is dead

By C. Bryson Hull and Ranga Sirilal

COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lanka's military said on Tuesday Tamil Tiger rebel leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran's body had been found, and President Mahinda Rajapaksa urged Tamils to join in rebuilding a nation split by a 25-year separatist war.

Footage broadcast on Sri Lankan TV showed what appeared to be the corpse of the man who plunged the Indian Ocean island nation into one of the world's most intractable wars, his eyes open, face bloated and the top of his head blown off.

The military declared total victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) after a climactic gunbattle on Monday, putting Sri Lanka completely back under government rule for the first time since the war erupted in 1983.

State TV showed victorious soldiers -- some clearly too young to have been born when the war started in 1983 -- firing their AK-47s in the air as an officer motioned for them to cease fire.

With a war long viewed as unwinnable now over, Rajapaksa gave a speech in parliament promising major development in the formerly Tiger-controlled areas in northern Sri Lanka and pledging to protect the rights of Tamils.

"It is necessary that the political solutions they need should be brought to them," he said. "However, it cannot be an imported solution ... it is necessary that we find a solution that is our very own, of our own nation."

He pledged rapid resettlement of the more than 250,000 Tamils now in internment camps and urged international investors to come to Sri Lanka and invest in its rebuilding.

"This is our country, this is our motherland. We should live in this country as children of one mother. No differences of race, caste and religion should prevail here," Rajapaksa, who is Sinhalese, said in Tamil.

Tamils complain of marginalization by successive governments led by the Sinhalese ethnic majority, which came to power at independence in 1948 and took the favored position the minority Tamils had enjoyed under the British colonial government.

The LTTE sprang up in the 1970s to fight for a separate nation for Tamils. After destroying rival groups, it later grew into one of the world's best-armed irregular forces with a place on more than 30 nations' lists of terrorist groups.

PRABHAKARAN DEAD

Army commander General Sarath Fonseka for the first time gave official confirmation of Prabhakaran's death shortly after a pro-rebel website said he was "alive and safe."

"The good news from the war front is that the body of the leader of the terrorist organization which destroyed the country for the last 30 years, Prabhakaran, has been found this morning by the army. We have identified the body," Fonseka said.

Moments later, private television stations Derana and Swarnavahini showed soldiers surrounding what they said was Prabhakaran's body, with his trademark mustache and distinctive Tiger stripe camouflage fatigues.

Later in the day, a former top LTTE fighter who defected to the government, Vinyagamoorthy Muralitharan, flew to northern Sri Lanka and positively identified the body, state TV showed.