Sri Lanka says it's winning battle with Tigers

COLOMBO, Aug 13 (Reuters) - Sri Lanka's government said today it had pushed back a Tamil Tiger offensive on the northern Jaffna peninsula, but fighting continued and analysts remained sceptical that Colombo was telling the whole truth.

Yesterday the Tigers broke through army defences in the northern army-held Jaffna peninsula, cut off from the rest of the island by rebel lines. Telephone contact with the town remains extremely difficult.

''The area is now totally under control,'' an army spokesman said. ''We have pushed them back behind their FDL (forward defence line). '' The military said 27 personnel had been killed and 87 wounded so far in the Jaffna battle, which erupted after days of fighting further south that was initially sparked by the closure of a rebel-held sluice gate providing water to government territory.

International ceasefire monitors said they believed the rebels were trying to cut the supply lines to Jaffna, an area that has changed hands several times in two decades of civil war that has killed more than 65,000 people.

With the main Jaffna airbase apparently hit by rebel artillery fire and Tiger fighters landing by sea on a navy-held island off the peninsula, Janes' Defence Weekly analyst Iqbal Athas said the military appeared under serious pressure.

''Last night, it was looking pretty grim,'' he said. ''With the air base under fire, one of the umbilicals to Jaffna has been cut.'' Police said Special Task Force police commandos had also attacked a rebel camp in the eastern district of Batticaloa.

The fighting has been accompanied by killings and attempted assassinations in the island's south, well away from the front lines. Yesterday evening, gunmen shot the deputy head of the government peace secretariat Kethesh Loganathan in the capital, Colombo. He died overnight in hospital.

HUMANITARIAN CRISIS Analysts say that if attacks and particularly bomb blasts become frequent in Colombo, foreign investors and tourists may flee.

Loganathan was a member of the minority Tamil community who had told Reuters he supported the government's military action against the rebels and believed the international community was ''mollycoddling'' the Tigers.

Most diplomats had blamed the Tigers for an escalation of violence this year that killed more than 800 people even before ground fighting began.

Many diplomats now believe the government was behind the final escalation to all-out fighting and is no longer interested in stopping. The country's key aid donors, Japan, the European Union, United States and Norway, have called for an immediate end to the fighting.

Truce monitors also accuse the government of blocking a probe into last week's execution-style killings of 17 Sri Lankan staff of a Paris-based aid agency during fighting in the northeastern town of Mutur. Some of the families of the dead, almost all of them Tamils, already blame government forces.

Aid workers say the Tigers, who want a separate Tamil homeland, are also refusing to allow thousands of displaced Tamils to leave their territory in the northeast and are effectively using them as human shields.

Reuters LL GC0950