Last phase of Sri Lanka war killed 6,200 troops: government

By C. Bryson Hull and Ranga Sirilal

COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lanka has for the first time made public its heavy casualties from the last phase of the 25-year war, and the U.N. chief flew to the island on Friday to push for a rapid end to a lingering humanitarian crisis.

Officials said over 6,000 soldiers were killed and nearly 30,000 injured since a battle in July 2006 that the military marks as the start of "Eelam War IV," the final stage of the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

In the capital Colombo, tens of thousands of people marched through the streets on Friday to parliament's grounds for a rally called to honor soldiers.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa, speaking to the assembled throng, brushed off Western calls for a war crimes probe into acts by both sides in the final months of the war.

"Since (the July 2006 battle at) Mavil Aru, 6,261 soldiers have laid down their lives for the unitary status of the motherland and 29,551 were wounded," Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa told the state-run Independent Television Network.

Troops killed 22,000 LTTE fighters during Eelam War IV, military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said.

Sri Lanka declared total victory over the LTTE on Monday after killing off its leadership and remaining fighters in a climactic final battle in the northeast of the island.

Nearly 300,000 Tamil civilians who followed or were taken by the Tigers as the military relentlessly cornered them, are now in crowded displacement camps after fleeing in the final months of what was Asia's longest modern war.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, due to land in Sri Lanka late on Friday, will call on the government to allow aid agencies to have full access to the camps and push for a political solution, U.N. officials said.

The LTTE had fought to create the separate nation that it called Eelam -- the Tamil word for homeland -- in northern and eastern Sri Lanka

The government had previously given casualty figures only erratically, and stopped reporting them entirely last year, mindful of a public that might not stomach heavy losses.

TENS OF THOUSANDS DEAD

The United Nations this week said the conflict had killed between 80,000-100,000 people since it erupted into full-scale civil war in 1983 -- including unofficial and unverified tallies showing 7,000 civilian deaths since January.

The government does not give a civilian casualty figure, but says it did not use heavy weapons in the final months and blamed the Tigers for civilian deaths. It says the United Nations numbers were inflated by the LTTE to secure pressure for a truce.

In the waning days of the war, Western governments and the United Nations human called for probes into potential war crimes and violations by both sides.