More than 6,200 Sri Lankan troops have been killed and nearly 30,000 injured since the last phase of the war against the Tamil Tigers began in July 2006.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the Defence Secretary, revealed the death toll for the first time in an interview last night with state-run television.

“We made huge sacrifices for this victory,” he said.

The Government stopped publishing military casualty figures last year, anxious to maintain recruitment levels for the Army and public support for its campaign to defeat the Tigers after 26 years of civil war.

Its last estimate for military deaths, released late last year, was 3,800 over the previous 18 months.

Mr Rajapaksa said that the new death toll for the Army, Navy, Air Force, police and civil defence force since July 2006 was 6,261, with 29,551 wounded.

The total number of military deaths since 1981 was 23,790.

The new figures give a measure of the intensity of the fighting since the start of this year, when the Army captured the Tigers’ de facto capital and drove them into a small piece of land on the northeastern coast.

Sri Lanka formally declared victory on Tuesday after killing or capturing the last of the Tigers, who were banned as a terrorist organisation by the United States, the European Union, India, Canada and Australia.

The true human cost of Asia’s longest modern war is still unclear, however — not least because the Government has blocked reporters and aid workers from visiting the scene of the final battle, or talking to civilian witnesses.

The military said several months ago that it had killed at least 20,000 Tigers in this phase of the war, but has yet to give a final tally. The Tigers admitted in November that they had lost more than 22,000 fighters since 1982.

There is also uncertainty over the number of civilian casualties, especially since the start of the year, when more than 200,000 non-combatants were trapped with the Tigers in the tiny conflict zone.

Unconfirmed UN estimates suggest that 7,000 civilians have been killed since January 20.

The Government says that is an exaggeration, but has not given its own estimate, although President Mahinda Rajapaksa, the Defence Secretary’s brother, told Parliament on Tuesday that the Army had won “without shedding the blood of civilians”.

The Tigers accuse the army of killing more than 20,000 civilians in the last phase of the fighting.

International aid agencies have warned that thousands more civilian lives could be lost if the Government does not allow better access to almost 300,000 Tamil civilians being held and screened in internment camps.

Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, is due in Sri Lanka later today on a 24-hour mission to press for unrestricted humanitarian access to the camps where aid workers say water, medicine and other basic needs are in short supply.

He is expected to visit some of the better-equipped camps in the northern district of Vavuniya tomorrow and to meet President Rajapaksa and Rohitha Bogollagama, the Foreign Minister.

The UN chief has also joined the EU in calling for an international investigation into allegations that both sides committed war crimes by targeting civilians.

Overall, the United Nations estimated this week that 80,000 to 100,000 people had been killed on all sides since the civil war began in 1983.

Times Recommends

• Mandela’s tribe threatens President Zuma
• The French empire strikes back
• Wife of cheating governor exacts a political revenge