Sri Lanka’s Army declared yesterday that it was on the verge of capturing the Tamil Tigers’ jungle headquarters, in its biggest step yet towards defeating them, as promised, by the end of the year.

Government forces had reached the outskirts of Kilinochchi, the Tigers’ self-declared capital, and the rebels were in retreat from the town about 205 miles (330km) north of Colombo, it said. “The fall of Kilinochchi is very imminent,” a government defence official told a news conference. “Troops are in the outskirts of Kilinochchi and consolidating the power.”

Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, a military spokesman, told The Times that 1,000 Tigers — about a quarter of their remaining forces — were defending Kilinochchi against about 6,000 troops. “Once it’s lost, they’ve lost all credibility,” he said.

Kilinochchi’s capture would be a devastating blow for the Tigers, whose violent campaign for an ethnic Tamil homeland has left more than 70,000 people dead since it began in 1983.

The town is the administrative centre of a parallel state that the rebels have tried to establish to protect the Tamil minority from a Government dominated by the ethnic Sinhalese majority.

The Tigers, who are listed as a terrorist group by the US and EU, are likely to continue to fight from the surrounding jungle, but the Government could claim to have fulfilled its pledge to defeat them by the end of the year.

The Sri Lankan officials declined to say precisely how far government forces were from the town, or when it would fall, and their claim was impossible to verify as journalists are banned from the conflict zone.

The Tigers were not available for comment as their usual communication lines have been cut since the Army began pushing towards Kilinochchi in September.

However, speculation is mounting that the Government will announce the fall of Kilinochchi today to upstage an annual address by Vellupillai Prabhakaran, the Tigers’ leader, to the Tamil people. Mr Prabhakaran, who turned 54 yesterday, traditionally uses the Heroes’ Day speech to honour the Tigers’ dead and to rally the large Tamil diaspora which funds the rebels.

The speech is usually recorded in a bunker in northern Sri Lanka and broadcast using a hidden transmitter over the Voice of Tigers radio station.

But the station’s headquarters were flattened by government jets a year ago and it is unclear how Mr Prabhakaran will communicate his message this year.

Kilinochchi’s capture would be the most significant victory for the Government since the Tigers set up their capital there in 1995 after being evicted from the northern city of Jaffna.

“Practically and symbolically, this is a major victory for the Government,” Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, of the Centre of Policy Alternatives in Colombo, told The Times.

“It shows the Tigers are really on the back foot. The question is: at what cost?” Human rights activists accuse the Government of widespread abuses against ethnic Tamils — including extrajudicial killings — since a 2002 truce began to unravel in early 2006.

The Army pushed the Tigers out of eastern Sri Lanka in July 2007 and began an attack on the north this year after the Government formally scrapped the truce in January.

Troops advanced on Kilinochchi rapidly at first, but became bogged down about a mile from the town for several weeks as monsoon rains turned the territory into a mudbath.

The Army pressed on, however, and on November 15 seized the entire western coast for the first time since 1993, allowing it to attack Kilinochchi from three sides.

There has been ferocious fighting around the town ever since, and earlier this week, the military said that it had killed 122 rebels in three days.

However, both sides routinely exaggerate each other’s casualty figures and analysts say that the Tigers still have significant forces, including large numbers of suicide bombers.

They have also fought back from apparently imminent defeat several times in the past. Six months after losing Jaffna in 1995, they overran an Army base in the northeast, slaughtering more than 1,000 soldiers and causing a slump in public support for the war.

In 1999 they reversed military gains made in 19 months in a matter of five days.

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