The Tamil Tigers admitted defeat yesterday in their separatist struggle as hundreds of Sri Lankan government troops closed in on a diminishing patch of coconut grove where the last of the rebels — and possibly their elusive leader — were surrounded.

Selvarasa Pathmanathan, the Tigers’ chief of international relations, announced that the rebels were laying down their weapons after 26 years of fighting for an ethnic Tamil homeland. “This battle has reached its bitter end,” Mr Pathmanathan, who is in hiding, said in a statement published on the pro-rebel Tamilnet website.

The statement came one day after President Rajapaksa had declared victory over the Tigers, ending what has been Asia’s longest-running civil war.

Mr Pathmanathan said: “We have decided to silence our guns. Our only regrets are for the lives lost and that we could not hold out for longer.” He added that there were fewer than 2,000 Tigers in the conflict zone — reduced to a few hundred square metres on the northeastern coast — and that more than 3,000 people had died there in the previous 24 hours. The Government denied the claim.

He also said that Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tamil Tigers’ leader, was still on the front line and wanted the international community to help to broker a ceasefire. The Government appeared determined, however, to finish off the Tigers, despite repeated international appeals for a ceasefire and threats of war crimes investigations and other sanctions.

The army said that its troops had found the bodies of 70 Tigers, including two senior leaders. It said it had yet to find Prabhakaran, who has vowed not to be taken alive and is said to carry a vial of cyanide around his neck. There were rumours that he and his son, Charles Anthony, had blown themselves up.

In Sri Lanka there were muted celebrations over the apparent death of the Tigers as a fighting force, but fears that a military victory would not mark the end of the violence. Mano Ganesan, a prominent Tamil MP and human rights activist, said: “The war is won but the political conditions [underpinning] Tamil militancy remain undefeated.”

Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, a military spokesman, told The Times last night that the army had avoided a civilian bloodbath by rescuing 62,000 people held by the Tigers as human shields.

A few hundred troops were conducting a “mop-up operation” for the final handful of rebels in an area of just 800 square metres after surrounding them and cutting them off from the sea for the first time on Saturday, he added.

A satellite image of the area released by the military showed the mangled wreckage of several vehicles on fire, billowing thick black smoke and a row of tents. “They were actually defeated some time ago, but they have formally accepted defeat only now,” said Brigadier Nanayakkara.

“They fought for an Eelam [separate state] that they could never win. It was only a waste of lives. They have caused massive death and destruction over the years. Finally they themselves have realised that it is all over.”

Across the country there were sharply contrasting reactions to the bloody climax of a conflict that has cost at least 70,000 lives and crippled Sri Lanka’s economy since 1983.

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