Sri Lanka helicopter gunships fire rockets at rebels

COLOMBO, Feb 6 (Reuters) Sri Lankan helicopter gunships today rocketed Tamil Tiger rebels in the island's far northeast, the military said, but there was no word on casualties.

The attack in the northeastern district of Trincomalee comes just days after President Mahinda Rajapakse vowed to defeat and tame the Tigers while offering to resume peace talks to end a new chapter in their two-decade civil war.

''There was a gathering in Kaddawan jungle in the north of Trincomalee district. Air force helicopters took air targets this morning,'' said military spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe.

The Tigers said they had no immediate details on any damage from the air attack, which comes after clashes and attacks in the northern district of Vavuniya and Trincomalee yesterday that killed three security forces personnel and wounded four.

The Tigers laugh off Rajapakse's calls to surrender arms, and say they do not trust his government to be sincere at talks -- instead vowing to fight on for independence.

The pro-rebel Tamil National Alliance (TNA), a cluster of minority Tamil political parties seen as the Tigers' proxies in parliament, today shunned a call by Rajapakse to join forces with or talk to his government.

''We reject in toto his appeal,'' TNA parliamentarian M K Eeladenthan told Reuters. ''(Rajapakse) condemned the Tigers as terrorists. ''To us the government is indulging in state terrorism.'' ''We who represent the Tamils, the accredited leaders of the Tamils, we will never become sell-outs, weaklings and collaborators to join a government to commit political suicide.'' Apparently emboldened by the capture last month of a key eastern Tiger enclave, the government has vowed to destroy the rebels' entire military machine.

Analysts fear that means a fresh escalation in a war that has killed more than 67,000 people since 1983 and more than 4,000 in the past year alone.

The island's main opposition party, the United National Party (UNP), today formally declared dead a cross-party pact with Rajapakse's ruling coalition aimed at seeking a consensus solution to the conflict.

UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe, who narrowly lost to Rajapakse in 2005 presidential elections, is furious at a mass defection to the government from his party, which lost 18 MPs in January.

''This has destroyed all possibilities of having an inclusive approach to the critical national issues,'' Wickremesinghe said in a statement to parliament.

However some analysts doubt that the pact would have achieved much even if it had held, pointing out that the government's devolution proposals fall far short of the Tigers' demands.

REUTERS SY BD1517