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Colombo, May 18 : Sri Lanka's 26-year-long insurgency ended with a blaze of bullets as Velupillai Prabhakaran, the dreaded chief of the Tamil Tigers that was responsible for assassinating Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and several leaders of the island nation, was killed Monday while trying to flee the battle zone. Wild celebrations erupted in large parts of Sri Lanka, including capital Colombo, as the authorities announced that the elusive 54-year-old - who fled his home in 1972 with nothing more than a dream to carve out an independent Tamil homeland - had died, ending one of the world's longest running insurgencies that bled the tiny country of 20 million people dominated by the Sinhalese. Soldiers fired at an ambulance in which Prabhakaran was being taken by his loyalists from the war zone in the north. His face apparently caught fire and he breathed his last in a small stretch of land near the coast in Mullaitivu district, an area about 400 km from here, which he had made his hideout a long time ago, building seemingly impregnable underground bunkers. The death came hours after his elder son Charles Anthony, who headed the group's IT wing and was being groomed to succeed him, was also killed. It marked the collapse of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which Prabhakaran set up in 1976 and which became one of the most well-armed and ruthless insurgent groups in the world with its own army, navy and air force. It also came three days before the 18th <b>...</b> |
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