Sri Lanka troops hunt rebels as refugees flood camps

MANKERNI, Sri Lanka, Jan 20 (Reuters) Sri Lanka's army pursued fleeing Tamil Tiger fighters today after the rebels abandoned their eastern stronghold following weeks of fierce fighting and thousands of refugees arrived at crowded camps.

Some refugees caught for weeks in the crossfire of deadly artillery battles told how the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had used them as cover and threatened to kill them unless they stayed put while the rebels made their retreat.

''The LTTE did not allow us to move. They threatened us,'' said 45-year-old paddy field labourer Thambdemuthu Kulasekaran, who with his seven children, wife and disabled mother were among more than 10,000 refugees who fled to government territory yesterday.

''There was so much shelling, so we moved to the south to here,'' he said at an army checkpoint in the town of Mankerni, near what used to be the front line in the area between military and rebels. ''I left all my belongings behind. The last meal I had was the day before yesterday.'' Hundreds of refugees, many elderly or children, were packed into buses with the few belongings they had salvaged to be moved further south to camps near the town of Batticaloa as troops searched for landmines and booby-traps they say the Tigers left in their wake.

Around 20,000-25,000 refugees had already fled the rebel enclave in recent weeks, and they are now housed in rudimentary tent cities much like the ones many of them lived in after the 2004 tsunami washed away their homes.

SUSPECTED INFILTRATORS The military, who are checking refugees from head to toe in their search for suspected Tiger infiltrators, said 10 youths had surrendered and one other had been arrested on suspicion of being a rebel as their sobbing parents, themselves refugees, protested.

TIGERS PULL BACK Troops were still searching for withdrawing rebel fighters now hemmed into a diminishing pocket of land by the coast in the eastern district of Trincomalee, where the army has driven the Tigers from terrain they controlled under the terms of a battered 2002 ceasefire which now holds only on paper.

''They are fighting in small groups, with mortars and small arms fire,'' said military spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe. ''We are in the process of capturing them. We are checking the refugees to find any Tigers hiding among them.'' Yesterday's capture of Vakarai a town around 240 km northeast of Colombo that belongs to the rebels under the terms of a tattered 2002 ceasefire followed weeks of fierce fighting between the Tigers and the military, who have vowed to evict them from the east altogether.

The area around Vakarai was one of several pockets of territory the Tigers control in the region, their last remaining direct access to the sea in the east, an important supply line.

The Tigers' patches of mostly jungle terrain in the east are cut off from their main northern stronghold by army-held areas.

The Tigers said overnight they had decided to readjust their positions in the east and pull back, accusing the military of preventing aid from reaching the trapped civilians and causing a humanitarian crisis.

Tiger spokesmen were unavailable for comment today.

The LTTE resumed its fight for an independent state for minority Tamils in the north and east after the majority Sinhalese government rejected demands for a separate homeland.

With a rash of suicide bombings, air raids and land and sea battles in recent months, analysts fear an escalation of the war that has killed more than 67,000 people since 1983.

REUTERS SY KP1235