Sri Lankan Rebels Near Defeat

Sri Lankan forces attacked a rebel-held village in the north with heavy machine gun fire early Monday, just hours after rejecting the Tamil Tigers' call for a truce as a ploy to avoid certain destruction, a rebel-linked Web site reported.

The military attacked the small, coastal village of Mullivaikal from the north, south and west about 3:45 a.m. Monday, TamilNet reported. The village is in a no-fire zone the government demarcated inside rebel territory as a civilian refuge.

The Web site said the area was densely populated with tens of thousands of civilians.

"Confrontations are taking place," military spokesman Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara said. "We are moving forward."

The Sri Lankan government said later Monday it would stop using heavy weapons and air strikes in the northern war zone to prevent further casualties among the civilians there.

In a statement, the government said it concluded that combat operations had reached their conclusion and its troops would no longer use heavy machine guns, air strikes or artillery in the battle against the Tamil Tiger rebels.

The assault on Mullivaikal, which began late Sunday, came amid growing diplomatic pressure for a cease-fire to allow tens of thousands of civilians trapped in the war zone to escape to safety.

The top U.N. humanitarian official, John Holmes, met Sri Lanka's foreign minister Monday to express concern for the estimated 50,000 trapped civilians before flying to a village south of the war zone to inspect displacement camps overwhelmed by the massive influx of war refugees in recent days.

The British government also said it was sending Foreign Secretary David Miliband to Sri Lanka with his French and Swedish counterparts Wednesday to attempt to mediate the conflict and address the dangers faced by civilians. Sri Lanka has rejected previous British mediation offers.

The government's statement Monday suggested its military forces had all but crush the rebels and possibly brought an end to this Indian Ocean island nation's quarter century civil war. A recent government offensive forced the rebels out of their strongholds in the north and cornered them in a narrow coastal strip, less than 4 miles long.

Reports from the war zone have detailed growing cases of starvation and civilian casualties in recent days and the U.N. reported last week that nearly 6,500 civilians had been killed in the fighting over the past three months.

Saying they were concerned about the fate of the civilians, the rebels declared a unilateral cease-fire Sunday, saying all offensive military operations would "cease with immediate effect."

They asked the international community to pressure the government to halt its offensive as well, saying the "humanitarian crisis can only be overcome by the declaration of an immediate cease-fire," according to a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press.

The government, which has said the Tamil Tigers were holding the civilians as human shields, rejected the appeal and accused the rebels of playing for time.

"This is a joke," Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa said.

Both sides had declared previous cease-fires during the recent fighting, but they did little more than briefly interrupt the war's momentum because the other side continued fighting.

The Tamil Tigers, listed as a terrorist group by many Western nations, have been fighting since 1983 for an ethnic Tamil state in the north and east after decades of marginalization by governments dominated by the Sinhalese majority.