Sri Lankan troops were today mopping up the remnants of the defeated Tamil Tigers as thousands of civilians trapped for months between the warring sides made their way to safety.
Some of the rebel fighters were reported to be blowing themselves up as troops approached, and a large explosion in a bunker prompted speculation that the Tigers' leadership had killed themselves. The army claimed that intercepted radio communications had revealed a mass suicide plan.
Selvarasa Pathmanathan, the Tigers' chief of international relations, said the rebels had abandoned the fight and were laying down their arms. In a statement on the pro-Tamil website TamilNet, he admitted that the three-decade war was over. "This battle has reached its bitter end," he said.
The same website cited the Sea Tigers commander, Soosai, claiming that thousands of bodies were lying on the ground or in bunkers.
The military said more than 50,000 people had escaped from the fighting in the last 72 hours. It claimed to have boxed the remaining rebels into a 400-metre by 600-metre pocket of land.
Earlier, Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, the Sri Lankan military spokesman, said: "Suicide cadres are coming in front of troops in the frontline and exploding themselves."
The wherebouts of the doctors who treated civilian casualties inside the so-called no-fire zone during the fighting, and who provided a running commentary on the scale of the unfolding humanitarian catasrophe, remained unknown, although one – Thurairaja Varatharajah – was reported to have been badly wounded trying to escape. It is believed that medical staff were detained by Sri Lankan forces as they joined civilians fleeing the area.
The president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, scheduled a nationally televised news conference for Tuesday morning, in which he is expected to tell the country the war is over.
Thousands of Sri Lankans poured into the streets this morning, dancing and setting off celebratory fireworks, after Rajapaksa made an initial declaration of victory. "We are celebrating a victory against terrorism," said Sujeewa Anthonis, a 32-year-old street hawker.
Downing Street said the prime minister, Gordon Brown, had made several phone calls yesterday to Rajapaksa urging him to end the violence.
There were no reliable figures available for civilian casualties, but with tens of thousands of people crammed into an area of less than a square mile, humanitarian agencies feared the worst. "It is hard to think of a worse place on earth to be right now than on that stretch of beach," said James Elder, the Unicef spokesman in Sri Lanka.
The military said last night that 10,000 civilians had breached the Tigers' inner cordon and were being shepherded to safety under fire from the rebels. Elder said those who remained in the zone were at the mercy of "indiscriminate firing" from all sides.
"It is a bloodbath. It is a catastrophic situation," he said. "We are seeing a complete disregard for civilian life. Everyone's worst-case scenario is coming to pass."
About 20,000 people are believed to have escaped from the no-fire zone between Thursday and Friday afternoon, but Elder said many of those who had managed to get out were in a terrible condition.
"When you look at the state of the first people to leave three weeks ago, there were malnourished children and women, and people with gunshot wounds and shrapnel injuries, and these people now have been there for another three weeks with next to nothing to eat in terrible conditions. It is going to be a nightmare," he said.
Gordon Weiss, a UN spokesman, said reliable reports from inside the war zone had dried up after the "courageous" doctors who had been working out of the last makeshift hospital at Mullaivaikal East primary school were forced to abandon the building in the face of heavy fighting on Friday. "We are most concerned about the fate of the 30,000 to 80,000 people who are left inside the combat zone," he said. "This is precisely the situation we feared all along – that they would be left inside at the penultimate moments of the battle."
On Friday, the Sri Lankan army completed a pincer movement to surround the Tigers, seizing control of the coastline and cutting off the rebel group's escape route to the sea. Attempts by the International Committee of the Red Cross to evacuate thousands of wounded civilians failed last week. The organisation said the scale of the fighting made it impossible to get casualties out.